Comparing two pandas dataframes for differences

Question

I\'ve got a script updating 5-10 columns worth of data , but sometimes the start csv will be identical to the end csv so instead of writing an identical csvfile I want it to

Answer 1

A more accurate comparison should check for index names separately, because DataFrame.equals does not test for that. All the other properties (index values (single/multiindex), values, columns, dtypes) are checked by it correctly.

df1 = pd.DataFrame([[1, 'a'], [2, 'b'], [3, 'c']], columns=['num', 'name'])
df1 = df1.set_index('name')
df2 = pd.DataFrame([[1, 'a'], [2, 'b'], [3, 'c']], columns=['num', 'another_name'])
df2 = df2.set_index('another_name')

df1.equals(df2)
True

df1.index.names == df2.index.names
False

Note: using index.names instead of index.name makes it work for multi-indexed dataframes as well.