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

Probably you may need function to compare DataFrames ignoring both row and column order? Only requirement is to have some unique column to use it as index.

f1 = pd.DataFrame([
    {"id": 1, "foo": "1", "bar": None},
    {"id": 2, "foo": "2", "bar": 2},
    {"id": 3, "foo": "3", "bar": 3},
    {"id": 4, "foo": "4", "bar": 4}
])
f2 = pd.DataFrame([
    {"id": 3, "foo": "3", "bar": 3},
    {"id": 1, "bar": None, "foo": "1",},
    {"id": 2, "foo": "2", "bar": 2},
    {"id": 4, "foo": "4", "bar": 4}
])

def comparable(df, index_col='id'):
    return df.fillna(value=0).set_index(index_col).to_dict('index')

comparable(f1) == comparable (f2)  # returns True