python 2.7 - Pandas: A clean way to initialize data frame with a list of namedtuple

Question

I'm new to pandas, therefore perhaps I'm asking a very stupid question. Normally initialization of data frame in pandas would be column-wise, where I put in dict with key of column names and values of list-like object with same length.

But I would love to initialize row-wise without dynamically concat-ing rows. Say I have a list of namedtuple, is there a optimized operation that will give me a pandas data frame directly from it?

Many many thanks

Answer 1

In a similar vein to creating a Series from a namedtuple, you can use the _fields attribute:

In [11]: Point = namedtuple('Point', ['x', 'y'])

In [12]: points = [Point(1, 2), Point(3, 4)]

In [13]: pd.DataFrame(points, columns=Point._fields)
Out[13]: 
   x  y
0  1  2
1  3  4

Assuming they are all of the same type, in this example all Points.