You can use the following methods to get a column name by index position in pandas:

Method 1: Get One Column Name by Index Position

#get column name in index position 2
colname = df.columns[2]

Method 2: Get Multiple Column Names by Index Positions

#get column names in index positions 2 and 4
colname = df.columns[[2, 4]] 

The following examples show how to use each method in practice with the following pandas DataFrame:

import pandas as pd

#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'team': ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H'],
                   'points': [18, 22, 19, 14, 14, 11, 20, 28],
                   'assists': [5, 7, 7, 9, 12, 9, 9, 4],
                   'rebounds': [11, 8, 10, 6, 6, 5, 9, 12],
                   'steals': [4, 3, 3, 2, 5, 4, 3, 8],
                   'blocks': [1, 0, 0, 3, 2, 2, 1, 5]})

#view DataFrame
print(df)

  team  points  assists  rebounds  steals  blocks
0    A      18        5        11       4       1
1    B      22        7         8       3       0
2    C      19        7        10       3       0
3    D      14        9         6       2       3
4    E      14       12         6       5       2
5    F      11        9         5       4       2
6    G      20        9         9       3       1
7    H      28        4        12       8       5

Example 1: Get One Column Name by Index Position

The following code shows how to get the column name for the column in index position 2 of the DataFrame:

#get column name for column in index position 2
colname = df.columns[2]

#display column nameprint(colname)

assists

The column name for the column in index position 2 is assists.

Note: Column index values start at 0 in Python. Thus, the column in index position 2 would be the third column in the DataFrame, which has the name assists.

Example 2: Get Multiple Column Names by Index Positions

The following code shows how to get the column names for the columns in index positions 2 and 4 of the DataFrame:

#get column names in index positions 2 and 4
colname = df.columns[[2, 4]] 

#display column names
print(colname)

Index(['assists', 'steals'], dtype='object')

From the output we can see:

• The column name for the column in index position 2 is assists.
• The column name for the column in index position 4 is steals.

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in pandas: