Custom sorting in pandas dataframe

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Pandas 0.15 introduced Categorical Series, which allows a much clearer way to do this:

First make the month column a categorical and specify the ordering to use.

In [21]: df['m'] = pd.Categorical(df['m'], ["March", "April", "Dec"])

In [22]: df  # looks the same!
Out[22]:
   a  b      m
0  1  2  March
1  5  6    Dec
2  3  4  April

Now, when you sort the month column it will sort with respect to that list:

In [23]: df.sort_values("m")
Out[23]:
   a  b      m
0  1  2  March
2  3  4  April
1  5  6    Dec

Note: if a value is not in the list it will be converted to NaN.

An older answer for those interested…

You could create an intermediary series, and set_index on that:

df = pd.DataFrame([[1, 2, 'March'],[5, 6, 'Dec'],[3, 4, 'April']], columns=['a','b','m'])
s = df['m'].apply(lambda x: {'March':0, 'April':1, 'Dec':3}[x])
s.sort_values()

In [4]: df.set_index(s.index).sort()
Out[4]: 
   a  b      m
0  1  2  March
1  3  4  April
2  5  6    Dec

As commented, in newer pandas, Series has a replace method to do this more elegantly:

s = df['m'].replace({'March':0, 'April':1, 'Dec':3})

The slight difference is that this won’t raise if there is a value outside of the dictionary (it’ll just stay the same).

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