Pandas style function to highlight specific columns

Question

I have been trying to write a function to use with pandas style. I want to highlight columns that I specify in the arguments. This is not very elegant, but, for example:

Answer 1

You can do it bit more dynamically:

data =  pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(5, 3), columns=list('ABC'))

# dictionary of column colors
coldict = {'A':'grey', 'C':'yellow'}

def highlight_cols(s, coldict):
    if s.name in coldict.keys():
        return ['background-color: {}'.format(coldict[s.name])] * len(s)
    return [''] * len(s)

data.style.apply(highlight_cols, coldict=coldict)