How to Create a Dictionary from a DataFrame in Python?

This tutorial will discuss about unique ways to create a dictionary from a dataframe in Python.

Suppose we have a DataFrame,

     Name  Age    City
0    John   30   Tokyo
1  Ritika   35  London
2  Atharv   25   Paris

Nowm we want to create a list of dictionaries from this DataFrame. Like this,

[{'Name': 'John', 'Age': 30, 'City': 'Tokyo'},
 {'Name': 'Ritika', 'Age': 35, 'City': 'London'},
 {'Name': 'Atharv', 'Age': 25, 'City': 'Paris'}]

In the DataFrame, we have 3 columns i,e. Name, Age and City. There are 3 rows in the DataFrame. We want each row as a separate dictionary, where keys will be the column names and values will be the a row.

So we can do that using the to_dict() method of the DataFrame. In this method, we need to pass the orientation as records, and it will return a list of dictionary.

In this returned list each dictionares, each dictionary represent a single row from the DataFrame. In each dictionary the keys are the column names and values are the row values.

Let’s see the complete example,

import pandas as pd

# Create a DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'Name' : ['John', 'Ritika', 'Atharv'],
                   'Age'  : [30, 35, 25],
                   'City' : ['Tokyo', 'London', 'Paris']})

# print the DataFrame
print(df)

# Convert the DataFrame to a Dictionary
dictObj = df.to_dict(orient='records')

print(dictObj)

Output

     Name  Age    City
0    John   30   Tokyo
1  Ritika   35  London
2  Atharv   25   Paris
[{'Name': 'John', 'Age': 30, 'City': 'Tokyo'}, {'Name': 'Ritika', 'Age': 35, 'City': 'London'}, {'Name': 'Atharv', 'Age': 25, 'City': 'Paris'}]

Summary

We learned how to create a Dictionary from a DataFrame.