Obtaining the first few rows of a dataframe

Question

Is there a way to get the first n rows of a dataframe without using the indices. For example, I know if I have a dataframe called df I could get the first 5 rows via df.ix[5:] . But, what if my indices are not ordered and I dont want to order them? This does not seem to work. Hence, I was wondering if there is another way to select the first couple of rows. I apologize if there is already an answer to this. I wasnt able to find one.

Answer 1

Use head(5) or iloc[:5]

In [7]:
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(10,3))
df

Out[7]:
          0         1         2
0 -1.230919  1.482451  0.221723
1 -0.302693 -1.650244  0.957594
2 -0.656565  0.548343  1.383227
3  0.348090 -0.721904 -1.396192
4  0.849480 -0.431355  0.501644
5  0.030110  0.951908 -0.788161
6  2.104805 -0.302218 -0.660225
7 -0.657953  0.423303  1.408165
8 -1.940009  0.476254 -0.014590
9 -0.753064 -1.083119 -0.901708

In [8]:
df.head(5)

Out[8]:
          0         1         2
0 -1.230919  1.482451  0.221723
1 -0.302693 -1.650244  0.957594
2 -0.656565  0.548343  1.383227
3  0.348090 -0.721904 -1.396192
4  0.849480 -0.431355  0.501644

In [11]:
df.iloc[:5]

Out[11]:
          0         1         2
0 -1.230919  1.482451  0.221723
1 -0.302693 -1.650244  0.957594
2 -0.656565  0.548343  1.383227
3  0.348090 -0.721904 -1.396192
4  0.849480 -0.431355  0.501644