Proper Way To Access A Column Of A Pandas Dataframe

For example I have a dataframe like this. Date Open High Low Close \ 0 2009-08-25 20246.789063 20476.250000 20143.509766 20435.240234

Solution 1:

Using . as a column accessor is a convenience. There are many limitations beyond having spaces in the name. For example, if your column is named the same as an existing dataframe attribute or method, you won't be able to use it with a .. A non-exhaustive list is mean, sum, index, values, to_dict, etc. You also cannot reference columns with numeric headers via the . accessor.

So, yes, ['col'] is strictly better than .col because it is more consistent and reliable.