Pandas select match multiple columns

Question

I have data like this:

category = ['Car','Car','Car','Car','Truck','Truck','Truck']
name = ['Camry','Camry','Camry','Camry','Tacoma','Tundra','Tundra']
year = ['2007','2007','2008','2009','2010','2010','2011']
vals = [0.1,0.5,0.2,0.9,0.8,0.4,0.9]
df = pd.DataFrame({'Category': category,
                   'Name': name,
                   'Year': year,
                   'Vals': vals})

index	Category	Name	Year	Vals
0	Car	Camry	2007	0.1
1	Car	Camry	2007	0.5
2	Car	Camry	2008	0.2
3	Car	Camry	2009	0.9
4	Truck	Tacoma	2010	0.8
5	Truck	Tundra	2010	0.4
6	Truck	Tundra	2011	0.9

I then have a set of combinations of (Category, Name, Year) that I want to filter the data frame for. They could be in whatever format, but here they are in a data frame.

combinations_i_want = pd.DataFrame()
# (Car, Camry, 2007)
combinations_i_want = combinations_i_want.append({'Category':'Car', 'Name':'Camry','Year':'2007'},ignore_index=True) # 2 matches in df
# (Truck, Tundra, 2010)
combinations_i_want = combinations_i_want.append({'Category':'Truck', 'Name':'Tundra','Year':'2010'},ignore_index=True) # 1 match in df

I want to extract the rows in df that exactly match these two combinations. Those would be rows 0, 1, and 5. The resulting table would look like this:

index	Category	Name	Year	Vals
0	Car	Camry	2007	0.1
1	Car	Camry	2007	0.5
5	Truck	Tundra	2010	0.4

Note: I don't need to old indices, they are just for help visualizing.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

You can simply right join on the columns you want.

result = df.merge(combinations_i_want, how='right', on=['Category', 'Name', 'Year'])