Adding variable description in DataFrame

[ghost]

Hi,

I think it would be great if DataFrame is able to store additional property (list of strings) which contains the description for each variable (column). And then it can be shown by themselves with variable names as well as in the output of pandas.DataFrame.info(). I think with this DataFrame will be pretty much self contained. Right now I need to keep additional object or a text file which contains those descriptions.

Please let me know what do you think!

-Joon

[CRP]

I second this request. Something similar is available in matlab's dataset object, which, in addition to ObsNames (=pandas indices) and VarNames (=pandas columns), also has VarDescription und Unit, which are freely usable. I, for example, use the former for verbose descriptions of the column names, and the latter to hold excel formatting strings (eg '0.00%'). This is useful when I want to output the dataset to excel nicely formatted.

[lodagro]

Indeed this sound interesting.
On top of that, it would be nice to able to store unit for each column (as CRP commented).

[lodagro]

Something more to store ... default column formatter.

It would be nice to be able to define a default column display formatter.
print df.to_string(formatters=...) can be used to do this, but it would be easier not having to type this each time.

Use case could be to display integers in non decimal format, typically hex or binary.

[cpcloud]

might be nice to combine all of these into one meta data issue to rule them all

[jreback]

closing as covered by #2485