R-like range() function

[lbeltrame]

In R, if I supply range(dataframe), I get back a vector of the minimum value in all the dataframe and the maximum value in all the dataframe.

DataFrame's min() and max() functions operate only on single columns. The way to do it currently is

minimum, maximum = (min(df.min()), max(df.max())

It's not a critical limitation, but it is convenient to have at times.

[wesm]

What about df.describe()?

[lbeltrame]

I looked into that: it returns a new DataFrame with the various statistics separated for each column. I was more interested in "global" (df-wide) values. I understand however that with mixed-type colums this may be a problem.

[wesm]

Ah, I got it. Should just start a tools module and put things like this there. I don't think it merits an instance method. Do you think it should return a Series?

[lbeltrame]

In my opinion yes, a Series would do perfectly.

[changhiskhan]

@wesm any other useful functions to put in here? no sense in you spending time merging for 4 lines of code.

[wesm]

feel free to just accumulate things in a branch and I'll merge them whenever. i'm about to put the kibosh on anymore changes to 0.5.1, do a little more sanity checking, fix up docs, then cut the release