Equality in Pandas DataFrames - Column Order Matters?

Question

As part of a unit test, I need to test two DataFrames for equality. The order of the columns in the DataFrames is not important to me. However, it seems to matter to Panda

Answer 1

The most common intent is handled like this:

def assertFrameEqual(df1, df2, **kwds ):
    """ Assert that two dataframes are equal, ignoring ordering of columns"""
    from pandas.util.testing import assert_frame_equal
    return assert_frame_equal(df1.sort_index(axis=1), df2.sort_index(axis=1), check_names=True, **kwds )

Of course see pandas.util.testing.assert_frame_equal for other parameters you can pass