How do you extract a column from a multi-dimensional array?

Question

Does anybody know how to extract a column from a multi-dimensional array in Python?

Answer 1

If you want to grab more than just one column just use slice:

 a = np.array([[1, 2, 3],[4, 5, 6],[7, 8, 9]])
    print(a[:, [1, 2]])
[[2 3]
[5 6]
[8 9]]

Answer 2

If you have a two-dimensional array in Python (not numpy), you can extract all the columns like so,

data = [
['a', 1, 2], 
['b', 3, 4], 
['c', 5, 6]
]

columns = list(zip(*data))

print("column[0] = {}".format(columns[0]))
print("column[1] = {}".format(columns[1]))
print("column[2] = {}".format(columns[2]))

Executing this code will yield,

>>> print("column[0] = {}".format(columns[0]))
column[0] = ('a', 'b', 'c')

>>> print("column[1] = {}".format(columns[1]))
column[1] = (1, 3, 5)

>>> print("column[2] = {}".format(columns[2]))
column[2] = (2, 4, 6)

Of course, you can extract a single column by index (e.g. columns[0])

Answer 3

def get_col(arr, col):
    return map(lambda x : x[col], arr)

a = [[1,2,3,4], [5,6,7,8], [9,10,11,12],[13,14,15,16]]

print get_col(a, 3)

map function in Python is another way to go.

Answer 4

You can use this as well:

values = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6]])
values[...,0] # first column
#[1,4]

Note: This is not working for built-in array and not aligned (e.g. np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6,7]]) )

Answer 5

Just use transpose(), then you can get the colummns as easy as you get rows

matrix=np.array(originalMatrix).transpose()
print matrix[NumberOfColum]

Answer 6

I think you want to extract a column from an array such as an array below

import numpy as np
A = np.array([[1,2,3,4],[5,6,7,8],[9,10,11,12]])

Now if you want to get the third column in the format

D=array[[3],
[7],
[11]]

Then you need to first make the array a matrix

B=np.asmatrix(A)
C=B[:,2]
D=asarray(C)

And now you can do element wise calculations much like you would do in excel.