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My goal with Tuesday Tips is to help you get better at Data Science every week.

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👉 Tip #38: Five ways to rename your DataFrame columns

Let's say that we have a simple pandas DataFrame:

I prefer to use dot notation to select pandas columns, but that won't work since the column names have spaces. Let's fix this!

The most flexible method for renaming columns is the rename() method. You pass it a dictionary in which the keys are the old names and the values are the new names:

The best thing about this method is that you can use it to rename any number of columns, whether it's just one column or all columns.

Now if you're going to rename all of the columns at once, a simpler method is just to overwrite the columns attribute of the DataFrame:

If the only thing you're doing is replacing spaces with underscores, an even better method is to use the str.replace() method, since you don't have to type out all of the column names:

All three of these methods have the same result, which is to rename the columns so that they don't have any spaces:

Finally, if you just need to add a prefix or suffix to all of your column names, you can use the add_prefix() method:

Or the add_suffix() method:

📈 Going further

If you have some pandas experience and want more tips like this, check out My top 25 pandas tricks 🐼🤹‍♂️ on YouTube.

If you're new to pandas, I'm excited to announce that my new course, pandas in 30 days, will available soon!

👋 Until next time

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See you next Tuesday!

- Kevin

P.S. The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong (YouTube)

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