how to replace index of columns and rows in Pandas DataFRame

Question

I am trying to get confident with Pandas, I would like to understand how can I use one generic DataFrame column as row index and how can I delete it from the matrix.

Say that I have a matrix such as

    a  b  c   d  e
11  2  1  0  aa  2
22  1  1  0  bb  1
33  4  b  3  cc  9
44  5  2  2  dd  5
55  2  9  8  ee  6

in which the first column and the first row are not data but indexes. I would like the d column ('aa', 'bb', 'cc', 'dd', 'ee') to be the row index, I don't care of the original row index and I don't want the 'd' column to be a matrix column. Long story short I would like a matrix such as

    a  b  c  e
aa  2  1  0  2
bb  1  1  0  1
cc  4  b  3  9
dd  5  2  2  5
ee  2  9  8  6

in which 'a', 'b', 'c', 'e' and 'aa', 'bb', 'cc', 'dd', 'ee' are column and row indexes respectively. How can I do this job?

Answer 1

You can use set_index :

print df
    a  b  c   d  e
11  2  1  0  aa  2
22  1  1  0  bb  1
33  4  b  3  cc  9
44  5  2  2  dd  5
55  2  9  8  ee  6

print df.set_index('d')
    a  b  c  e
d             
aa  2  1  0  2
bb  1  1  0  1
cc  4  b  3  9
dd  5  2  2  5
ee  2  9  8  6

Or with reset index name :

df = df.set_index('d')
df.index.name= None
print df
    a  b  c  e
aa  2  1  0  2
bb  1  1  0  1
cc  4  b  3  9
dd  5  2  2  5
ee  2  9  8  6