Extract values in Pandas value_counts()

Question

Say we have used pandas' dataframe[column].value_counts() which outputs:

 apple   5 
 sausage 2
 banana  2
 cheese  1

How do you extract the values from this in the order shown above e.g. max to min ? [apple,sausage,banana,cheese]

Answer 1

Try this:

dataframe[column].value_counts().index.tolist()
['apple', 'sausage', 'banana', 'cheese']

Answer 2

#!/usr/bin/env python

import pandas as pd

# Make example dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame([(1, 'Germany'),
                   (2, 'France'),
                   (3, 'Indonesia'),
                   (4, 'France'),
                   (5, 'France'),
                   (6, 'Germany'),
                   (7, 'UK'),
                   ],
                  columns=['groupid', 'country'],
                  index=['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g'])

# What you're looking for
values = df['country'].value_counts().keys().tolist()
counts = df['country'].value_counts().tolist()

Now, print(df['country'].value_counts()) gives:

France       3
Germany      2
UK           1
Indonesia    1

and print(values) gives:

['France', 'Germany', 'UK', 'Indonesia']

and print(counts) gives:

[3, 2, 1, 1]

Answer 3

If anyone missed it out in the comments, try this:

dataframe[column].value_counts().to_frame()

Answer 4

First you have to sort the dataframe by the count column max to min if it's not sorted that way already. In your post, it is in the right order already but I will sort it anyways:

dataframe.sort_index(by='count', ascending=[False])
    col     count
0   apple   5
1   sausage 2
2   banana  2
3   cheese  1 

Then you can output the col column to a list:

dataframe['col'].tolist()
['apple', 'sausage', 'banana', 'cheese']