I have the following dataframes:

> df1
  id begin conditional confidence discoveryTechnique  
0 278    56       false        0.0                  1   
1 421    18       false        0.0                  1 

> df2
   concept 
0  A  
1  B
   

How do I merge on the indices to get:

  id begin conditional confidence discoveryTechnique   concept 
0 278    56       false        0.0                  1  A 
1 421    18       false        0.0                  1  B

I ask because it is my understanding that merge() i.e. df1.merge(df2) uses columns to do the matching. In fact, doing this I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/core/frame.py", line 4618, in merge
    copy=copy, indicator=indicator)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/tools/merge.py", line 58, in merge
    copy=copy, indicator=indicator)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/tools/merge.py", line 491, in __init__
    self._validate_specification()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/tools/merge.py", line 812, in _validate_specification
    raise MergeError('No common columns to perform merge on')
pandas.tools.merge.MergeError: No common columns to perform merge on

Is it bad practice to merge on index? Is it impossible? If so, how can I shift the index into a new column called “index”?

Use merge, which is inner join by default:

pd.merge(df1, df2, left_index=True, right_index=True)

Or join, which is left join by default:

df1.join(df2)

Or concat, which is outer join by default:

pd.concat([df1, df2], axis=1)

Samples:

df1 = pd.DataFrame({'a':range(6),
                    'b':[5,3,6,9,2,4]}, index=list('abcdef'))

print (df1)
   a  b
a  0  5
b  1  3
c  2  6
d  3  9
e  4  2
f  5  4

df2 = pd.DataFrame({'c':range(4),
                    'd':[10,20,30, 40]}, index=list('abhi'))

print (df2)
   c   d
a  0  10
b  1  20
h  2  30
i  3  40

#default inner join
df3 = pd.merge(df1, df2, left_index=True, right_index=True)
print (df3)
   a  b  c   d
a  0  5  0  10
b  1  3  1  20

#default left join
df4 = df1.join(df2)
print (df4)
   a  b    c     d
a  0  5  0.0  10.0
b  1  3  1.0  20.0
c  2  6  NaN   NaN
d  3  9  NaN   NaN
e  4  2  NaN   NaN
f  5  4  NaN   NaN

#default outer join
df5 = pd.concat([df1, df2], axis=1)
print (df5)
     a    b    c     d
a  0.0  5.0  0.0  10.0
b  1.0  3.0  1.0  20.0
c  2.0  6.0  NaN   NaN
d  3.0  9.0  NaN   NaN
e  4.0  2.0  NaN   NaN
f  5.0  4.0  NaN   NaN
h  NaN  NaN  2.0  30.0
i  NaN  NaN  3.0  40.0

you can use concat([df1, df2, …], axis=1) in order to concatenate two or more DFs aligned by indexes:

pd.concat([df1, df2, df3, ...], axis=1)

or merge for concatenating by custom fields / indexes:

# join by _common_ columns: `col1`, `col3`
pd.merge(df1, df2, on=['col1','col3'])

# join by: `df1.col1 == df2.index`
pd.merge(df1, df2, left_on='col1' right_index=True)

or join for joining by index:

 df1.join(df2)

By default:
join is a column-wise left join
pd.merge is a column-wise inner join
pd.concat is a row-wise outer join

pd.concat:
takes Iterable arguments. Thus, it cannot take DataFrames directly (use [df,df2])
Dimensions of DataFrame should match along axis

Join and pd.merge:
can take DataFrame arguments

A silly bug that got me: the joins failed because index dtypes differed. This was not obvious as both tables were pivot tables of the same original table. After reset_index, the indices looked identical in Jupyter. It only came to light when saving to Excel…

Fixed with: df1[['key']] = df1[['key']].apply(pd.to_numeric)

Hopefully this saves somebody an hour!

If u want to join two dataframes in pandas you can simply use available attributes like merge or concatenate. For example if I have two dataframes df1 and df2 I can join them by:

newdataframe=merge(df1,df2,left_index=True,right_index=True)