How to delete a column from a data frame with pandas?

Question

I read my data

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv(\'/path/file.tsv\', header=0, delimiter=\'\\t\')
print df

and get:

Answer 1

To actually delete the column

del df['id'] or df.drop('id', 1) should have worked if the passed column matches exactly

However, if you don't need to delete the column then you can just select the column of interest like so:

In [54]:

df['text']
Out[54]:
0    text1
1    text2
2    textn
Name: text, dtype: object

If you never wanted it in the first place then you pass a list of cols to read_csv as a param usecols:

In [53]:
import io
temp="""id    text
363.327    text1
366.356    text2
37782    textn"""
df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(temp), delimiter='\s+', usecols=['text'])
df
Out[53]:
    text
0  text1
1  text2
2  textn

Regarding your error it's because 'id' is not in your columns or that it's spelt differently or has whitespace. To check this look at the output from print(df.columns.tolist()) this will output a list of the columns and will show if you have any leading/trailing whitespace.