Get first and second highest values in pandas columns

Question

I am using pandas to analyse some election results. I have a DF, Results, which has a row for each constituency and columns representing the votes for the various parties (o

Answer 1

You could just sort your results, such that the first rows will contain the max. Then you can simply use indexing to get the first n places.

RawResults = Results.ix[:, 'Unnamed: 9': 'Zeb'].sort_values(by='votes', ascending=False)
RawResults.iloc[0, :] # First place
RawResults.iloc[1, :] # Second place
RawResults.iloc[n, :] # nth place