Changes in python objects

Traps in python

I am enthusiast programmer, thus I am no a professional. I wanna getting better and some times I write some notes to improve my English and programming skills. Certainly you will find some mistakes in the text and programming concepts in this post, I am sorry, I am trying.

Lets go to what matter now!

The word change is ambiguous in Python, it means that we have two distinct types of “change” in Python.

There a change for an assignment statement, and a change through a mutation.

Let’s say we have a variable x pointing to the value 7.

>>> x = 7
>>> id(x)
9062816

If we point x to a new object (e.g. a list), it’s id will change:

>>> x = [7, 8, 9]
>>> id(x)
140573420844168

If we assign x to y this will make y point to the same memory location as x:

>>> y = x
>>> id(y)
140573420844168

If change some item of x, the value will be changed in y.

>>> x[2] = 51
>>> y
[7, 8, 51]

The same happens in Data Frame:

>>> df_a = pd.DataFrame({'NAME': ['Joe', 'Mary', 'Paul'],
... 'AGE': [25, 35, 46]})
>>> df_a
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   46

If We assign df_b equal df_a:

>>> df_b = df_a
>>> df_b
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   46

Now if We change a item in df_a, We get the same effect on df_b:

>>> df_a.iloc[2,1] = 99
>>> df_a
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   99
>>> df_b
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   99

To avoid that in Pandas, We need to use the method copy():

>>> df_a = pd.DataFrame({'NAME': ['Joe', 'Mary', 'Paul'],
... 'AGE': [25, 35, 46]})
>>> df_b = df_a.copy()
>>> df_a
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   46
>>> df_b
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   46
>>> df_a.iloc[2,1] = 99
>>> df_a
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   99
>>> df_b
   NAME  AGE
0   Joe   25
1  Mary   35
2  Paul   46

That is it. Be careful for other objects (array, list, etc).

References

https://pandas.pydata.org

https://www.python.org/

https://www.pythonmorsels.com/topics/2-types-change/

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