Pandas dropping column issue

Question

I'm trying to drop a column from my dataframe, but the problem is that whenever I drop the column (which works) my columns always get rearranged in different orders. Does anyone know why this might be? This is my code right now:

df=df.drop('column_name', axis=1)

Answer 1

One way to do it is:

df = df[[col1,col2,col4]] #if col3 is what you want to drop

This is useful when you have fewer columns.

Answer 2

I can not reproduce your problem. But I believe the following code can keep the order. It's the same idea as runzhi xiao's answer, but without typing all the remaining columns.

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'col1': [1, 2, 3, 4],
    'col2': ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o'],
    'col3': ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o'],
    'col4': [0.1, 0.2, 1, 2],
})
cols_to_drop = ['col2']
new_columns = df.columns.drop(cols_to_drop).to_list()
df[new_columns]

   col1 col3  col4
0     1    a   0.1
1     2    e   0.2
2     3    i   1.0
3     4    o   2.0