How to replace NaNs by preceding values in pandas DataFrame?

Question

Suppose I have a DataFrame with some NaNs:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1, 2, 3], [4, None, None], [None, N         


        

Answer 1

The accepted answer is perfect. I had a related but slightly different situation where I had to fill in forward but only within groups. In case someone has the same need, know that fillna works on a DataFrameGroupBy object.

>>> example = pd.DataFrame({'number':[0,1,2,nan,4,nan,6,7,8,9],'name':list('aaabbbcccc')})
>>> example
  name  number
0    a     0.0
1    a     1.0
2    a     2.0
3    b     NaN
4    b     4.0
5    b     NaN
6    c     6.0
7    c     7.0
8    c     8.0
9    c     9.0
>>> example.groupby('name')['number'].fillna(method='ffill') # fill in row 5 but not row 3
0    0.0
1    1.0
2    2.0
3    NaN
4    4.0
5    4.0
6    6.0
7    7.0
8    8.0
9    9.0
Name: number, dtype: float64