python - How to reversibly store and load a Pandas dataframe to/from disk

Question

Right now I'm importing a fairly large CSV as a dataframe every time I run the script. Is there a good solution for keeping that dataframe constantly available in between runs so I don't have to spend all that time waiting for the script to run?

Answer 1

The easiest way is to pickle it using to_pickle:

df.to_pickle(file_name)  # where to save it, usually as a .pkl

Then you can load it back using:

df = pd.read_pickle(file_name)

Note: before 0.11.1 save and load were the only way to do this (they are now deprecated in favor of to_pickle and read_pickle respectively).

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Another popular choice is to use HDF5 (pytables) which offers very fast access times for large datasets:

import pandas as pd
store = pd.HDFStore('store.h5')

store['df'] = df  # save it
store['df']  # load it

More advanced strategies are discussed in the cookbook.

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Since 0.13 there's also msgpack which may be be better for interoperability, as a faster alternative to JSON, or if you have python object/text-heavy data (see this question).