Basic selection from a Series

Selection from a pd.Series involves accessing elements either by their position or by their label. This is akin to accessing elements in a list by their index or in a dictionary by their key, respectively. The versatility of the pd.Series object allows intuitive and straightforward data retrieval, making it an essential tool for data manipulation.

The pd.Series is considered a container in Python, much like the built-in list, tuple, and dict objects. As such, for simple selection operations, the first place users turn to is the Python index operator, using the [] syntax.

How to do it

To introduce the basics of selection, let’s start with a very simple pd.Series:

ser = pd.Series(list("abc") * 3)
ser

0    a
1    b
2    c
3    a
4    b
5    c
6    a
7    b
8    c
dtype: object

In Python, you’ve already discovered that the [] operator can be used to select elements from a container; i.e., some_dictionary[0...