How to select and delete columns with duplicate name in pandas DataFrame

You can adress columns by index:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2],[3,4],[5,6]], columns=['a','a'])
>>> df
   a  a
0  1  2
1  3  4
2  5  6
>>> df.iloc[:,0]
0    1
1    3
2    5

Or you can rename columns, like

>>> df.columns = ['a','b']
>>> df
   a  b
0  1  2
1  3  4
2  5  6

This is not a good situation to be in. Best would be to create a hierarchical column labeling scheme (Pandas allows for multi-level column labeling or row index labels). Determine what it is that makes the two different columns that have the same name actually different from each other and leverage that to create a hierarchical column index.

In the mean time, if you know the positional location of the columns in the ordered list of columns (e.g. from dataframe.columns) then you can use many of the explicit indexing features, such as .ix[], or .iloc[] to retrieve values from the column positionally.

You can also create copies of the columns with new names, such as:

dataframe["new_name"] = data_frame.ix[:, column_position].values

where column_position references the positional location of the column you're trying to get (not the name).

These may not work for you if the data is too large, however. So best is to find a way to modify the construction process to get the hierarchical column index.

Another solution:

def remove_dup_columns(frame):
     keep_names = set()
     keep_icols = list()
     for icol, name in enumerate(frame.columns):
          if name not in keep_names:
               keep_names.add(name)
               keep_icols.append(icol)
     return frame.iloc[:, keep_icols]

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

frame = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(0, 50, (5, 4)), columns=['A', 'A', 'B', 'B'])

print(frame)
print(remove_dup_columns(frame))

The output is

    A   A   B   B
0  18  44  13  47
1  41  19  35  28
2  49   0  30  16
3  39  29  43  41
4  26  19  48  13
    A   B
0  18  13
1  41  35
2  49  30
3  39  43
4  26  48

The following function removes columns with dublicate names and keeps only one. Not exactly what you asked for, but you can use snips of it to solve your problem. The idea is to return the index numbers and then you can adress the specific column indices directly. The indices are unique while the column names aren't

def remove_multiples(df,varname):
    """
    makes a copy of the first column of all columns with the same name,
    deletes all columns with that name and inserts the first column again
    """
    from copy import deepcopy
    dfout = deepcopy(df)
    if (varname in dfout.columns):
        tmp = dfout.iloc[:, min([i for i,x in enumerate(dfout.columns == varname) if x])]
        del dfout[varname]
        dfout[varname] = tmp
    return dfout

where

[i for i,x in enumerate(dfout.columns == varname) if x]

is the part you need