Calculating difference between two rows in Python / Pandas

Question

In python, how can I reference previous row and calculate something against it? Specifically, I am working with dataframes in pandas - I have a da

Answer 1

I don't know pandas, and I'm pretty sure it has something specific for this; however, I'll give you the pure-Python solution, that might be of some help even if you need to use pandas:

import csv
import urllib

# This basically retrieves the CSV files and loads it in a list, converting
# All numeric values to floats
url='http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=IBM&a=00&b=1&c=2011&d=11&e=31&f=2011&g=d&ignore=.csv'
reader = csv.reader(urllib.urlopen(url), delimiter=',')
# We sort the output list so the records are ordered by date
cleaned = sorted([[r[0]] + map(float, r[1:]) for r in list(reader)[1:]])

for i, row in enumerate(cleaned):  # enumerate() yields two-tuples: (, )
    # The try..except here is to skip the IndexError for line 0
    try:
        # This will calculate difference of each numeric field with the same field
        # in the row before this one
        print row[0], [(row[j] - cleaned[i-1][j]) for j in range(1, 7)]
    except IndexError:
        pass