[FIXED] How can I assign a list that I created to a dataframe cell?

Issue

I have a dataframe, dfTest, with three columns. One has year information, one has month information, and one is a list of dates.

Date1_Year  Date1_Month  Datelist
2020        5            ['2020-04','2020-01']
2020        9            [‘2020-08’, ‘2020-07’,’2020-06’]
2021        9            ['2021-09']
2020        12           ['2020-10','2020-01'] 
1999        03           NaN

Taking the first row as an example, I would like to calculate the number of months between the date represented by Date1_Year and Date2_Year (that is '2020-05') and each of the dates in DateList. The desired output would be:

Date1_Year  Date1_Month  DateList                         Month_Diff
2020        5            ['2020-04','2020-01']            [1,4]
2020        9            ['2020-08','2020-07','2020-06']  [1,2,3]
2021        9            ['2021-09']                      [0]
2020        12           ['2020-10','2020-01']            [2,11]
1999        03           NaN                              

This is my code:

for i in range(len(dfTest)):
    My_Date_List = dfTest.loc[i,'DateList']
    Date1Months = dfTest.loc[i,'Date1_Year']*12 + dfTest.loc[i,'Date1_Month']
    months_since_date1 = []

    if isinstance(My_Date_List,list):
        if len(My_Date_List) >= 1:
            for j in range(len(My_Date_List)):
                Date2_Year = int(My_Date_List[j][:4])
                Date2_Month = int(My_Date_list[j][5:])
                Date2Months = Date2_Year*12 + Date2_Month
                if Date1Months < Date2Months:
                    months_since_date1.append(-999)
                else:
                    months_since_date1.append(Date1Months-Date2Months)
             dfTest.loc[i,'Month_Diff'] = months_since_date1

I was able to test that months_since_date1 was being created as I expected, but when I add the line of code

dfTest.loc[i,'Month_Diff'] = months_since_date1

I get the message "ValueError: must have equal len keys and value when setting an iterable"

Please advise! What am I doing wrong?

Solution

Previous initialization via dfTest['Month_Diff'] = [[]] * len(dfTest) and later assignment via dfTest['Month_Diff'][i] = months_since_date1 do the trick, resulting in

#initialize the new column
dfTest['Month_Diff'] = [[]] * len(dfTest) 

for i in range(len(dfTest)):
    My_Date_List = dfTest.loc[i,'DateList']
    Date1Months = dfTest.loc[i,'Date1_Year']*12 + dfTest.loc[i,'Date1_Month']
    months_since_date1 = []

    if isinstance(My_Date_List,list):
        if len(My_Date_List) >= 1:
            for j in range(len(My_Date_List)):
                Date2_Year = int(My_Date_List[j][:4])
                Date2_Month = int(My_Date_List[j][5:])
                Date2Months = Date2_Year*12 + Date2_Month
                if Date1Months < Date2Months:
                    months_since_date1.append(-999)
                else:
                    months_since_date1.append(Date1Months-Date2Months)

            #assign the resulting list
            dfTest['Month_Diff'][i] = months_since_date1 

Answered By - flyakite