Pandas: Multiple columns into one column

Question

I have the following data (2 columns, 4 rows):

Column 1: A, B, C, D

Column 2: E, F, G, H

I am attempting to combine the columns into one c

Answer 1

You can flatten the values in column direction using ravel, is much faster.

In [1238]: df
Out[1238]:
  Column 1 Column 2
0        A        E
1        B        F
2        C        G
3        D        H

In [1239]: pd.Series(df.values.ravel('F'))
Out[1239]:
0    A
1    B
2    C
3    D
4    E
5    F
6    G
7    H
dtype: object

---

Details

Medium

In [1245]: df.shape
Out[1245]: (4000, 2)

In [1246]: %timeit pd.Series(df.values.ravel('F'))
10000 loops, best of 3: 86.2 µs per loop

In [1247]: %timeit df['Column 1'].append(df['Column 2']).reset_index(drop=True)
1000 loops, best of 3: 816 µs per loop

Large

In [1249]: df.shape
Out[1249]: (40000, 2)

In [1250]: %timeit pd.Series(df.values.ravel('F'))
10000 loops, best of 3: 87.5 µs per loop

In [1251]: %timeit df['Column 1'].append(df['Column 2']).reset_index(drop=True)
100 loops, best of 3: 1.72 ms per loop