Python: Pandas dataframe from Series of dict

Question

I have a Pandas dataframe:

type(original)
pandas.core.frame.DataFrame

which includes the series object original['user']:

type(original['user'])
pandas.core.series.Series

original['user'] points to a number of dicts:

type(original['user'].ix[0])
dict

Each dict has the same keys:

original['user'].ix[0].keys()

[u'follow_request_sent',
 u'profile_use_background_image',
 u'profile_text_color',
 u'id',
 u'verified',
 u'profile_location',
 # ... keys removed for brevity
]

Above is (part of) one of the dicts of user fields in a tweet from tweeter API. I want to build a data frame from these dicts.

When I try to make a data frame directly, I get only one column for each row and this column contains the whole dict:

pd.DataFrame(original['user'][:2])
    user
0   {u'follow_request_sent': False, u'profile_use_...
1   {u'follow_request_sent': False, u'profile_use_..

When I try to create a data frame using from_dict() I get the same result:

pd.DataFrame.from_dict(original['user'][:2])

    user
0   {u'follow_request_sent': False, u'profile_use_...
1   {u'follow_request_sent': False, u'profile_use_..

Next I tried a list comprehension which returned an error:

item = [[k, v] for (k,v) in users]
ValueError: too many values to unpack

When I create a data frame from a single row, it nearly works:

df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(original['user'].ix[0])
df.reset_index()

    index   contributors_enabled    created_at  default_profile     default_profile_image   description     entities    favourites_count    follow_request_sent     followers_count     following   friends_count   geo_enabled     id  id_str  is_translation_enabled  is_translator   lang    listed_count    location    name    notifications   profile_background_color    profile_background_image_url    profile_background_image_url_https  profile_background_tile     profile_image_url   profile_image_url_https     profile_link_color  profile_location    profile_sidebar_border_color    profile_sidebar_fill_color  profile_text_color  profile_use_background_image    protected   screen_name     statuses_count  time_zone   url     utc_offset  verified
0   description     False   Mon May 26 11:58:40 +0000 2014  True    False       {u'urls': []}   0   False   157

It works almost like I want it to, except it sets the description field as the default index.

Each of the dicts has 40 keys but I only need about 10 of them and I have 28734 rows in data frame.

How can I filter out the keys which I do not need?

Answer 1

what I would try to do is the following:

new_df = pd.DataFrame(list(original['user']))

this will convert the series to list then pass it to pandas dataframe and it should take care of the rest.