Append a pandas row with data from another dataframe if a certain column matches

Question

I have two dataframes with the same columns (they represent different years of a sporting season). If a player played in both seasons, I'd like to append certain information from the following season to that season's dataframe.

DF1

Name	PPG
Michael Jordan	31.7

DF2

Name	PPG
Michael Jordan	28.4

What I'd like to do is combine them (either into DF1 or a new DF3) and have three rows

Name	PPG	PPG Next Season
Michael Jordan	31.7	28.4

Not all players played in both seasons. How can I check all the players in DF1, see if they played in DF2, and if so add a new column to DF1 tracking those players DF2 PPG?

Answer 1

import pandas as pd

df1 = pd.DataFrame({'Name': ['Michael Jordan'], 'PPG': [31.7]})
df2 = pd.DataFrame({'Name': ['Michael Jordan'], 'PPG': [28.4]})

df3 = df1.merge(df2, on='Name', suffixes=('', ' Next Season'))

print(df3)

The suffixes parameter is used to add a suffix to the columns in df2 to avoid duplicate column names in the merged dataframe.

Name	PPG	PPG Next Season
Michael Jordan	31.7	28.4