Delete column from pandas DataFrame

Question

When deleting a column in a DataFrame I use:

del df[\'column_name\']

And this works great. Why can\'t I use the following?

Answer 1

If your original dataframe df is not too big, you have no memory constraints, and you only need to keep a few columns, or, if you don't know beforehand the names of all the extra columns that you do not need, then you might as well create a new dataframe with only the columns you need:

new_df = df[['spam', 'sausage']]