python - Nested List to Pandas Dataframe with headers

Question

Basically I am trying to do the opposite of How to generate a list from a pandas DataFrame with the column name and column values?

To borrow that example, I want to go from the form:

data = [['Name','Rank','Complete'],
               ['one', 1, 1],
               ['two', 2, 1],
               ['three', 3, 1],
               ['four', 4, 1],
               ['five', 5, 1]]

which should output:

 Name Rank Complete
  One    1        1
  Two    2        1
Three    3        1
 Four    4        1
 Five    5        1

However when I do something like:

pd.DataFrame(data)

I get a dataframe where the first list should be my colnames, and then the first element of each list should be the rowname

EDIT:

To clarify, I want the first element of each list to be the row name. I am scrapping data so it is formatted this way...

Answer 1

One way to do this would be to take the column names as a separate list and then only give from 1st index for pd.DataFrame -

In [8]: data = [['Name','Rank','Complete'],
   ...:                ['one', 1, 1],
   ...:                ['two', 2, 1],
   ...:                ['three', 3, 1],
   ...:                ['four', 4, 1],
   ...:                ['five', 5, 1]]

In [10]: df = pd.DataFrame(data[1:],columns=data[0])

In [11]: df
Out[11]:
    Name  Rank  Complete
0    one     1         1
1    two     2         1
2  three     3         1
3   four     4         1
4   five     5         1

---

If you want to set the first column Name column as index, use the .set_index() method and send in the column to use for index. Example -

In [16]: df = pd.DataFrame(data[1:],columns=data[0]).set_index('Name')

In [17]: df
Out[17]:
       Rank  Complete
Name
one       1         1
two       2         1
three     3         1
four      4         1
five      5         1