Pandas concat yields ValueError: Plan shapes are not aligned

Question

In pandas, I am attempting to concatenate a set of dataframes and I am getting this error:

ValueError: Plan shapes are not aligned

My underst

Answer 1

Wrote a small function to concatenate duplicated column names. Function cares about sorting if original dataframe is unsorted, the output will be a sorted one.

def concat_duplicate_columns(df):
    dupli = {}
    # populate dictionary with column names and count for duplicates 
    for column in df.columns:
        dupli[column] = dupli[column] + 1 if column in dupli.keys() else 1
    # rename duplicated keys with °°° number suffix
    for key, val in dict(dupli).items():
        del dupli[key]
        if val > 1:
            for i in range(val):
                dupli[key+'°°°'+str(i)] = val
        else: dupli[key] = 1
    # rename columns so that we can now access abmigous column names
    # sorting in dict is the same as in original table
    df.columns = dupli.keys()
    # for each duplicated column name
    for i in set(re.sub('°°°(.*)','',j) for j in dupli.keys() if '°°°' in j):
        i = str(i)
        # for each duplicate of a column name
        for k in range(dupli[i+'°°°0']-1):
            # concatenate values in duplicated columns
            df[i+'°°°0'] = df[i+'°°°0'].astype(str) + df[i+'°°°'+str(k+1)].astype(str)
            # Drop duplicated columns from which we have aquired data
            df = df.drop(i+'°°°'+str(k+1), 1)
    # resort column names for proper mapping
    df = df.reindex_axis(sorted(df.columns), axis = 1)
    # rename columns
    df.columns = sorted(set(re.sub('°°°(.*)','',i) for i in dupli.keys()))
    return df