pandas series can't get index

Question

not sure what the problem is here... all i want is the first and only element in this series

>>> a
1    0-5fffd6b57084003b1b582ff1e56855a6!1-AB87696         


        

Answer 1

When the index is integer, you cannot use positional indexers because the selection would be ambiguous (should it return based on label or position?). You need to either explicitly use a.iloc[0] or pass the label a[1].

The following works because the index type is object:

a = pd.Series([1, 2, 3], index=['a', 'b', 'c'])

a
Out: 
a    1
b    2
c    3
dtype: int64

a[0]
Out: 1

But for integer index, things are different:

a = pd.Series([1, 2, 3], index=[2, 3, 4])

a[2]  # returns the first entry - label based
Out: 1

a[1]  # raises a KeyError
KeyError: 1