How to Return a Column of a pandas DataFrame as a list in Python

John on April 21, 2021

To get a column from a pandas DataFrame and convert it into a list, use the pandas.DataFrame.tolist() method.

To demonstrate how to do this, let's create a new pandas DataFrame with some data then get one of the columns by its name.

import pandas

data = {
   'name': ['john', 'amy', 'ben'],
   'age': [29, 22, 30]
}

data_frame = pandas.DataFrame(data)

name_list = data_frame['name'].tolist()

print(name_list)
print(type(name_list))

['john', 'amy', 'ben']
<class 'list'>