How do I get the name of the rows from the index of a data frame?

df.index

• outputs the row names as pandas Index object.

list(df.index)

• casts to a list.

df.index['Row 2':'Row 5']

• supports label slicing similar to columns.

If you want to pull out only the index values for certain integer-based row-indices, you can do something like the following using the iloc method:

In [28]: temp
Out[28]:
       index                 time  complete
row_0      2  2014-10-22 01:00:00         0
row_1      3  2014-10-23 14:00:00         0
row_2      4  2014-10-26 08:00:00         0
row_3      5  2014-10-26 10:00:00         0
row_4      6  2014-10-26 11:00:00         0

In [29]: temp.iloc[[0,1,4]].index
Out[29]: Index([u'row_0', u'row_1', u'row_4'], dtype='object')

In [30]: temp.iloc[[0,1,4]].index.tolist()
Out[30]: ['row_0', 'row_1', 'row_4']

this seems to work fine :

dataframe.axes[0].tolist()