I am attempting a merge between two data frames. Each data frame has two index levels (date, cusip). In the columns, some columns match between the two (currency, adj date) for example.

What is the best way to merge these by index, but to not take two copies of currency and adj date.

Each data frame is 90 columns, so I am trying to avoid writing everything out by hand.

df:                 currency  adj_date   data_col1 ...
date        cusip
2012-01-01  XSDP      USD      2012-01-03   0.45
...

df2:                currency  adj_date   data_col2 ...
date        cusip
2012-01-01  XSDP      USD      2012-01-03   0.45
...

If I do:

dfNew = merge(df, df2, left_index=True, right_index=True, how='outer')

I get

dfNew:              currency_x  adj_date_x   data_col2 ... currency_y adj_date_y
date        cusip
2012-01-01  XSDP      USD      2012-01-03   0.45             USD         2012-01-03

Thank you! …

You can work out the columns that are only in one DataFrame and use this to select a subset of columns in the merge.

cols_to_use = df2.columns.difference(df.columns)

Then perform the merge (note this is an index object but it has a handy tolist() method).

dfNew = merge(df, df2[cols_to_use], left_index=True, right_index=True, how='outer')

This will avoid any columns clashing in the merge.

I use the suffixes option in .merge():

dfNew = df.merge(df2, left_index=True, right_index=True,
                 how='outer', suffixes=('', '_y'))
dfNew.drop(dfNew.filter(regex='_y$').columns.tolist(),axis=1, inplace=True)

Thanks @ijoseph

Building on @rprog’s answer, you can combine the various pieces of the suffix & filter step into one line using a negative regex:

dfNew = df.merge(df2, left_index=True, right_index=True,
             how='outer', suffixes=('', '_DROP')).filter(regex='^(?!.*_DROP)')

Or using df.join:

dfNew = df.join(df2, lsuffix="DROP").filter(regex="^(?!.*DROP)")

The regex here is keeping anything that does not end with the word “DROP”, so just make sure to use a suffix that doesn’t appear among the columns already.

I’m freshly new with Pandas but I wanted to achieve the same thing, automatically avoiding column names with _x or _y and removing duplicate data. I finally did it by using this answer and this one from Stackoverflow

sales.csv

    city;state;units
    Mendocino;CA;1
    Denver;CO;4
    Austin;TX;2

revenue.csv

    branch_id;city;revenue;state_id
    10;Austin;100;TX
    20;Austin;83;TX
    30;Austin;4;TX
    47;Austin;200;TX
    20;Denver;83;CO
    30;Springfield;4;I

merge.py import pandas

def drop_y(df):
    # list comprehension of the cols that end with '_y'
    to_drop = [x for x in df if x.endswith('_y')]
    df.drop(to_drop, axis=1, inplace=True)


sales = pandas.read_csv('data/sales.csv', delimiter=';')
revenue = pandas.read_csv('data/revenue.csv', delimiter=';')

result = pandas.merge(sales, revenue,  how='inner', left_on=['state'], right_on=['state_id'], suffixes=('', '_y'))
drop_y(result)
result.to_csv('results/output.csv', index=True, index_label='id', sep=';')

When executing the merge command I replace the _x suffix with an empty string and them I can remove columns ending with _y

output.csv

    id;city;state;units;branch_id;revenue;state_id
    0;Denver;CO;4;20;83;CO
    1;Austin;TX;2;10;100;TX
    2;Austin;TX;2;20;83;TX
    3;Austin;TX;2;30;4;TX
    4;Austin;TX;2;47;200;TX

This is a bit of going around the problem, but I have written a function that basically deals with the extra columns:

def merge_fix_cols(df_company,df_product,uniqueID):
    
    df_merged = pd.merge(df_company,
                         df_product,
                         how='left',left_on=uniqueID,right_on=uniqueID)    
    for col in df_merged:
        if col.endswith('_x'):
            df_merged.rename(columns = lambda col:col.rstrip('_x'),inplace=True)
        elif col.endswith('_y'):
            to_drop = [col for col in df_merged if col.endswith('_y')]
            df_merged.drop(to_drop,axis=1,inplace=True)
        else:
            pass
    return df_merged

Seems to work well with my merges!