[FIXED] Delete a column from a Pandas DataFrame

Issue

To delete a column in a DataFrame, I can successfully use:

del df['column_name']

But why can't I use the following?

del df.column_name

Since it is possible to access the column/Series as df.column_name, I expected this to work.

Solution

As you've guessed, the right syntax is

del df['column_name']

It's difficult to make del df.column_name work simply as the result of syntactic limitations in Python. del df[name] gets translated to df.__delitem__(name) under the covers by Python.

Answered By - Wes McKinney