Pandas long to wide reshape, by two variables

A bit old but I will post this for other people.

What you want can be achieved, but you probably shouldn't want it ;) Pandas supports hierarchical indexes for both rows and columns. In Python 2.7.x ...

from StringIO import StringIO

raw = '''Salesman  Height   product      price
  Knut      6        bat          5
  Knut      6        ball         1
  Knut      6        wand         3
  Steve     5        pen          2'''
dff = pd.read_csv(StringIO(raw), sep='\s+')

print dff.set_index(['Salesman', 'Height', 'product']).unstack('product')

Produces a probably more convenient representation than what you were looking for

                price             
product          ball bat pen wand
Salesman Height                   
Knut     6          1   5 NaN    3
Steve    5        NaN NaN   2  NaN

The advantage of using set_index and unstacking vs a single function as pivot is that you can break the operations down into clear small steps, which simplifies debugging.

Here's another solution more fleshed out, taken from Chris Albon's site.

Create "long" dataframe

raw_data = {'patient': [1, 1, 1, 2, 2],
                'obs': [1, 2, 3, 1, 2],
          'treatment': [0, 1, 0, 1, 0],
              'score': [6252, 24243, 2345, 2342, 23525]}

df = pd.DataFrame(raw_data, columns = ['patient', 'obs', 'treatment', 'score'])

Make a "wide" data

df.pivot(index='patient', columns='obs', values='score')

Karl D's solution gets at the heart of the problem. But I find it's far easier to pivot everything (with .pivot_table because of the two index columns) and then sort and assign the columns to collapse the MultiIndex:

df['idx'] = df.groupby('Salesman').cumcount()+1
df = df.pivot_table(index=['Salesman', 'Height'], columns='idx', 
                    values=['product', 'price'], aggfunc='first')

df = df.sort_index(axis=1, level=1)
df.columns = [f'{x}_{y}' for x,y in df.columns]
df = df.reset_index()

Output:

  Salesman  Height  price_1 product_1  price_2 product_2  price_3 product_3
0     Knut       6      5.0       bat      1.0      ball      3.0      wand
1    Steve       5      2.0       pen      NaN       NaN      NaN       NaN

A simple pivot might be sufficient for your needs but this is what I did to reproduce your desired output:

df['idx'] = df.groupby('Salesman').cumcount()

Just adding a within group counter/index will get you most of the way there but the column labels will not be as you desired:

print df.pivot(index='Salesman',columns='idx')[['product','price']]

        product              price        
idx            0     1     2      0   1   2
Salesman                                   
Knut         bat  ball  wand      5   1   3
Steve        pen   NaN   NaN      2 NaN NaN

To get closer to your desired output I added the following:

df['prod_idx'] = 'product_' + df.idx.astype(str)
df['prc_idx'] = 'price_' + df.idx.astype(str)

product = df.pivot(index='Salesman',columns='prod_idx',values='product')
prc = df.pivot(index='Salesman',columns='prc_idx',values='price')

reshape = pd.concat([product,prc],axis=1)
reshape['Height'] = df.set_index('Salesman')['Height'].drop_duplicates()
print reshape

         product_0 product_1 product_2  price_0  price_1  price_2  Height
Salesman                                                                 
Knut           bat      ball      wand        5        1        3       6
Steve          pen       NaN       NaN        2      NaN      NaN       5

Edit: if you want to generalize the procedure to more variables I think you could do something like the following (although it might not be efficient enough):

df['idx'] = df.groupby('Salesman').cumcount()

tmp = []
for var in ['product','price']:
    df['tmp_idx'] = var + '_' + df.idx.astype(str)
    tmp.append(df.pivot(index='Salesman',columns='tmp_idx',values=var))

reshape = pd.concat(tmp,axis=1)

@Luke said:

I think Stata can do something like this with the reshape command.

You can but I think you also need a within group counter to get the reshape in stata to get your desired output:

     +-------------------------------------------+
     | salesman   idx   height   product   price |
     |-------------------------------------------|
  1. |     Knut     0        6       bat       5 |
  2. |     Knut     1        6      ball       1 |
  3. |     Knut     2        6      wand       3 |
  4. |    Steve     0        5       pen       2 |
     +-------------------------------------------+

If you add idx then you could do reshape in stata:

reshape wide product price, i(salesman) j(idx)