select specific column from pandas MultiIndex dataframe

Question

I have a MultiIndex dataframe with 200 columns. I would like to select a specific column from that. Suppose df is some part of my dataframe:

df=
                       a                             b
                       l       h     l       h       l       h      l    
                      cold    hot    hot    cold    cold     hot   hot
2009-01-01 01:00:00   0.1     0.9    0.4    0.29    0.15     0.6    0.3
2009-01-01 02:00:00   0.1     0.8    0.35   0.2     0.15     0.6    0.4
2009-01-01 03:00:00   0.12    0.7    0.3    0.23    0.23     0.8    0.3
2009-01-01 04:00:00   0.1     0.9    0.33   0.24    0.15     0.6    0.4
2009-01-01 05:00:00   0.17    0.9    0.41   0.23    0.18     0.75   0.4

I would like to select the values for this column[h,hot].

My output should be:

df['h','hot']=
                       a      b
2009-01-01 01:00:00   0.9   0.6
2009-01-01 02:00:00   0.8   0.6
2009-01-01 03:00:00   0.7   0.8
2009-01-01 04:00:00   0.9   0.6
2009-01-01 05:00:00   0.9   0.75

I would appreciate any guidance on how I could select that.

Answer 1

For multi-index slicing as you desire the columns needs to be sorted first using sort_index(axis=1) , you can then select the cols of interest without error:

In [12]:
df = df.sort_index(axis=1)
df['a','h','hot']

Out[12]:
0
2009-01-01 01:00:00    0.9
2009-01-01 02:00:00    0.8
2009-01-01 03:00:00    0.7
2009-01-01 04:00:00    0.9
2009-01-01 05:00:00    0.9
Name: (a, h, hot), dtype: float64

Answer 2

Try this:

dataframe= pd.DataFrame()
dataframe["temp"] = df["b"]["h"]["hot"]

df - is your dataframe