convert python pandas dataframe with column names and index names to list of lists

Question

I would like to convert a the dataframe like below (where ix is the index of the dataframe)

ix	A	B
X	0	0
Y	0	0

to a list of lists like so:

[ [ix, A, B], [X, 0, 0], [Y, 0, 0] ]

to create a matrix (list of lists) that still contains the dataframe column and index names, A, B and X, Y respectively.

Answer 1

Convert columns to list and append the body list:

[df.columns.tolist()] + df.values.tolist()

[['ix', 'A', 'B'], ['X', 0, 0], ['Y', 0, 0]]

Or if you meant to just store this somewhere for reproducibility, you might want to use to_dict method:

df.to_dict('list')
{'ix': ['X', 'Y'], 'A': [0, 0], 'B': [0, 0]}

Answer 2

If all your columns are the same type, I would use .to_numpy and then add the columns to the array using something like:

a = df.to_numpy()
a = numpy.vstack([df.columns, a])

This involves more imports (technically), but you're already importing pandas so numpy isn't much else to bring in.