python - How to rearrange Pandas column sequence?

Question

>>> df =DataFrame({'a':[1,2,3,4],'b':[2,4,6,8]})
>>> df['x']=df.a + df.b
>>> df['y']=df.a - df.b
>>> df
   a  b   x  y
0  1  2   3 -1
1  2  4   6 -2
2  3  6   9 -3
3  4  8  12 -4

Now I want to rearrange the column sequence, which makes 'x','y' column to be the first & second columns by :

>>> df = df[['x','y','a','b']]
>>> df
    x  y  a  b
0   3 -1  1  2
1   6 -2  2  4
2   9 -3  3  6
3  12 -4  4  8

But if I have a long coulmns 'a','b','c','d'....., and I don't want to explictly list the columns. How can I do that ?

Or Does Pandas provide a function like set_column_sequence(dataframe,col_name, seq) so that I can do : set_column_sequence(df,'x',0) and set_column_sequence(df,'y',1) ?

Answer 1

You could also do something like this:

df = df[['x', 'y', 'a', 'b']]

You can get the list of columns with:

cols = list(df.columns.values)

The output will produce something like this:

['a', 'b', 'x', 'y']

...which is then easy to rearrange manually before dropping it into the first function