python - Sorting by absolute value without changing the data

Question

I'm looking for a simple way to sort a pandas dataframe by the absolute value of a particular column, but without actually changing the values within the dataframe. Something similar to sorted(df, key=abs). So if I had a dataframe like:

    a   b
0   1   -3
1   2   5 
2   3   -1
3   4   2
4   5   -9

The resultant sorted data when sorting on 'b' would look like:

    a   b
2   3   -1
3   4   2
0   1   -3
1   2   5 
4   5   -9

Answer 1

UPDATE

Since 0.17.0 order and sort have been deprecated (thanks @Ruggero Turra), you can use sort_values to achieve this now:

In[16]:

df.reindex(df.b.abs().sort_values().index)
Out[16]: 
   a  b
2  3 -1
3  4  2
0  1 -3
1  2  5
4  5 -9