Pandas - How to flatten a hierarchical index in columns

Question

I have a data frame with a hierarchical index in axis 1 (columns) (from a groupby.agg operation):

     USAF   WBAN  year  month  day  s_PC  s_CL         


        

Answer 1

In case you want to have a separator in the name between levels, this function works well.

def flattenHierarchicalCol(col,sep = '_'):
    if not type(col) is tuple:
        return col
    else:
        new_col = ''
        for leveli,level in enumerate(col):
            if not level == '':
                if not leveli == 0:
                    new_col += sep
                new_col += level
        return new_col

df.columns = df.columns.map(flattenHierarchicalCol)