I have a situation wherein sometimes when I read a csv from df I get an unwanted index-like column named unnamed:0.

file.csv

,A,B,C
0,1,2,3
1,4,5,6
2,7,8,9

The CSV is read with this:

pd.read_csv('file.csv')

   Unnamed: 0  A  B  C
0           0  1  2  3
1           1  4  5  6
2           2  7  8  9

This is very annoying! Does anyone have an idea on how to get rid of this?

It’s the index column, pass index=False to not write it out, see the docs

Example:

In [37]:
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(5,3), columns=list('abc'))
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(df.to_csv()))

Out[37]:
   Unnamed: 0         a         b         c
0           0  0.109066 -1.112704 -0.545209
1           1  0.447114  1.525341  0.317252
2           2  0.507495  0.137863  0.886283
3           3  1.452867  1.888363  1.168101
4           4  0.901371 -0.704805  0.088335

compare with:

In [38]:
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(df.to_csv(index=False)))

Out[38]:
          a         b         c
0  0.109066 -1.112704 -0.545209
1  0.447114  1.525341  0.317252
2  0.507495  0.137863  0.886283
3  1.452867  1.888363  1.168101
4  0.901371 -0.704805  0.088335

You could also optionally tell read_csv that the first column is the index column by passing index_col=0:

In [40]:
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(df.to_csv()), index_col=0)

Out[40]:
          a         b         c
0  0.109066 -1.112704 -0.545209
1  0.447114  1.525341  0.317252
2  0.507495  0.137863  0.886283
3  1.452867  1.888363  1.168101
4  0.901371 -0.704805  0.088335

This issue most likely manifests because your CSV was saved along with its RangeIndex (which usually doesn’t have a name). The fix would actually need to be done when saving the DataFrame, but this isn’t always an option.

Avoiding the Problem: read_csv with index_col argument

IMO, the simplest solution would be to read the unnamed column as the index. Specify an index_col=[0] argument to pd.read_csv, this reads in the first column as the index.

df = pd.DataFrame('x', index=range(5), columns=list('abc'))
df

   a  b  c
0  x  x  x
1  x  x  x
2  x  x  x
3  x  x  x
4  x  x  x

# Save DataFrame to CSV.
df.to_csv('file.csv')

pd.read_csv('file.csv')

   Unnamed: 0  a  b  c
0           0  x  x  x
1           1  x  x  x
2           2  x  x  x
3           3  x  x  x
4           4  x  x  x

# Now try this again, with the extra argument.
pd.read_csv('file.csv', index_col=[0])

   a  b  c
0  x  x  x
1  x  x  x
2  x  x  x
3  x  x  x
4  x  x  x

Note
You could have avoided this in the first place by using index=False when creating the output CSV, if your DataFrame does not have an index to begin with.

df.to_csv('file.csv', index=False)

But as mentioned above, this isn’t always an option.

Stopgap Solution: Filtering with str.match

If you cannot modify the code to read/write the CSV file, you can just remove the column by filtering with str.match:

df 

   Unnamed: 0  a  b  c
0           0  x  x  x
1           1  x  x  x
2           2  x  x  x
3           3  x  x  x
4           4  x  x  x

df.columns
# Index(['Unnamed: 0', 'a', 'b', 'c'], dtype='object')

df.columns.str.match('Unnamed')
# array([ True, False, False, False])

df.loc[:, ~df.columns.str.match('Unnamed')]

   a  b  c
0  x  x  x
1  x  x  x
2  x  x  x
3  x  x  x
4  x  x  x

Another case that this might be happening is if your data was improperly written to your csv to have each row end with a comma. This will leave you with an unnamed column Unnamed: x at the end of your data when you try to read it into a df.

To get ride of all Unnamed columns, you can also use regex such as df.drop(df.filter(regex="Unname"),axis=1, inplace=True)

Simply delete that column using: del df['column_name']