If the column you wish to elongate has the label "A_2012" for instance, then instead of specifying "A_" as the stubnames, you can set stubnames="A" and sep="_". By default, sep="".

6. suffixlink | string | optional

A string or regex that matches the suffix of columns to elongate. By default, suffix="\d+".

Return Value

A DataFrame whose columns have been unpivoted.

Examples

Consider the following DataFrame:


        
        
            
                
                
                    df = pd.DataFrame({"name":["alex","bob","cathy"], "savings_2019":[10,20,30], "savings_2020":[40,50,60]})
df
                
            
               name   savings_2019  savings_2020
0  alex       10            40
1  bob        20            50
2  cathy      30            60

Basic usage

To go from a wide DataFrame to a long one:


        
        
            
                
                
                    pd.wide_to_long(df, stubnames=["savings_"], i="name", j="year")
                
            
                         savings_
name   year	
alex   2019    10
bob    2019    20
cathy  2019    30
alex   2020    40
bob    2020    50
cathy  2020    60

Here, notice how the underscore was included in the stubnames ("savings_"). This is because without the _, the method will use suffix like "_2019" instead of just a number "2019" to look for column labels to unpivot. This is a problem because the default suffix parameter ("\d+") only allows for numbers.

The downside of this approach is that the new column name becomes savings_, which is undoubtedly awkward.

Specifying the sep parameter

Instead of "saving_", we can just let stubnames be "saving" and set sep="_" to get the same behaviour. The advantage of this is that our column name would now be savings:


        
        
            
                
                
                    pd.wide_to_long(df, stubnames=["savings"], i="name", j="year", sep="_")
                
            
                         savings
name   year	
alex   2019    10
bob    2019    20
cathy  2019    30
alex   2020    40
bob    2020    50
cathy  2020    60

Specifying the suffix parameter

Consider the following DataFrame:


        
        
            
                
                
                    df = pd.DataFrame({"name":["alex","bob","cathy"], "savings_2019A":[10,20,30], "savings_2020A":[40,50,60]})
df
                
            
               name  savings_2019A  savings_2020A
0  alex       10             40
1  bob        20             50
2  cathy      30             60

Here, the difference between this DataFrame and the previous DataFrame is that each column name has an "A" character appended to it.

If we call the wide_to_long(~) just as we did in the previous case, the result will be empty:


        
        
            
                
                
                    pd.wide_to_long(df, ["savings_"], i="name", j="year")
                
            
                          savings_2019A  savings_2020A  savings_
name	year

This is because the column name is now "2019A" instead of a number "2019". Since the default value of suffix only allows for numbers ("\d+"), the column "2019A" does not get unpivoted. We can fix this by setting the regex "\w+", which allows for terms such as "2019A":


        
        
            
                
                
                    pd.wide_to_long(df, ["savings"], i="name", j="year", sep="_", suffix="\w+")
                
            
                          savings
name   year	
alex   2019A    10
bob    2019A    20
cathy  2019A    30
alex   2020A    40
bob    2020A    50
cathy  2020A    60