Pandas DataFrame to List of Dictionaries

Question

I have the following DataFrame    customer    item1      item2    item3 1           apple      milk     tomato 2           water      orange   potato 3           juice      mango    chips   which I want to translate it to list of dictionaries per row  rows      customer   1   item1    apple    item2    milk    item3    tomato          customer   2   item1    water    item2    orange    item3    potato          customer   3   item1    juice    item2    mango    item3    chips

User · Answer

If you are interested in only selecting one column this will work.

df[["item1"]].to_dict("records")

The below will NOT work and produces a TypeError: unsupported type: . I believe this is because it is trying to convert a series to a dict and not a Data Frame to a dict.

df["item1"].to_dict("records")

I had a requirement to only select one column and convert it to a list of dicts with the column name as the key and was stuck on this for a bit so figured I'd share.

User · Answer

Use df to dict  records   -- gives the output without having to transpose externally   In  2   df to dict  records   Out 2      customer   1L   item1    apple    item2    milk    item3    tomato       customer   2L   item1    water    item2    orange    item3    potato       customer   3L   item1    juice    item2    mango    item3    chips

User · Answer

As an extension to John Galt s answer -  For the following DataFrame      customer  item1   item2   item3 0         1  apple    milk  tomato 1         2  water  orange  potato 2         3  juice   mango   chips   If you want to get a list of dictionaries including the index values  you can do something like    df to dict  index     Which outputs a dictionary of dictionaries where keys of the parent dictionary are index values  In this particular case     0    customer   1   item1    apple    item2    milk    item3    tomato     1    customer   2   item1    water    item2    orange    item3    potato     2    customer   3   item1    juice    item2    mango    item3    chips

User · Answer

Edit  As John Galt mentions in his answer   you should probably instead use df to dict  records    It s faster than transposing manually   In  20   timeit df T to dict   values   1000 loops  best of 3  395   s per loop  In  21   timeit df to dict  records   10000 loops  best of 3  53   s per loop     Original answer  Use df T to dict   values    like below   In  1   df Out 1      customer  item1   item2   item3 0         1  apple    milk  tomato 1         2  water  orange  potato 2         3  juice   mango   chips  In  2   df T to dict   values   Out 2      customer   1 0   item1    apple    item2    milk    item3    tomato       customer   2 0   item1    water    item2    orange    item3    potato       customer   3 0   item1    juice    item2    mango    item3    chips

[python] Pandas DataFrame to List of Dictionaries

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