How to extract non nan values from a dataframe

Question

I want to extract n consecutive cells (without taking into account the non values) from a dataframe like the following:

We can have the following dataframes for n=2:

or

Answer 1

Consider

>>> df 
     0    1     2   3
0  0.0  1.0   NaN  23
1  NaN  1.0  23.0   4
2  NaN  NaN   1.0   0
3  0.0  NaN   NaN   1
>>> df.apply(lambda s: s.dropna().iloc[:2].reset_index(drop=True), axis=1) 
     0     1
0  0.0   1.0
1  1.0  23.0
2  1.0   0.0
3  0.0   1.0

edit: this will give you the first two (or n ) non missing values from each row. Your question is unclear on whether this is sufficient.