Get column index from column name in python pandas

Sure, you can use .get_loc():

In [45]: df = DataFrame({"pear": [1,2,3], "apple": [2,3,4], "orange": [3,4,5]})

In [46]: df.columns
Out[46]: Index([apple, orange, pear], dtype=object)

In [47]: df.columns.get_loc("pear")
Out[47]: 2

although to be honest I don't often need this myself. Usually access by name does what I want it to (df["pear"], df[["apple", "orange"]], or maybe df.columns.isin(["orange", "pear"])), although I can definitely see cases where you'd want the index number.

Here is a solution through list comprehension. cols is the list of columns to get index for:

[df.columns.get_loc(c) for c in cols if c in df]

DSM's solution works, but if you wanted a direct equivalent to which you could do (df.columns == name).nonzero()

When you might be looking to find multiple column matches, a vectorized solution using searchsorted method could be used. Thus, with df as the dataframe and query_cols as the column names to be searched for, an implementation would be -

def column_index(df, query_cols):
    cols = df.columns.values
    sidx = np.argsort(cols)
    return sidx[np.searchsorted(cols,query_cols,sorter=sidx)]

Sample run -

In [162]: df
Out[162]: 
   apple  banana  pear  orange  peach
0      8       3     4       4      2
1      4       4     3       0      1
2      1       2     6       8      1

In [163]: column_index(df, ['peach', 'banana', 'apple'])
Out[163]: array([4, 1, 0])