1.5 Sorting on a column

One of the research questions was: which countries have the smallest and largest number of deaths?

Being a small table, it is not too difficult to scan the TB deaths column and find those countries. However, such a process is prone to errors and impractical for large tables. It’s much better to sort the table by that column, and then look up the countries in the first and last rows.

As you’ve guessed by now, sorting a table is another single line of code.

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data.sort_values('TB deaths')

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The dataframe method sort_values() takes as argument a column name and returns a new dataframe where the rows are in ascending order of the values in that column. Note that sorting doesn’t modify the original dataframe.

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data # rows still in original order

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It’s also possible to sort on a column that has text instead of numbers; the rows will be sorted in alphabetical order.

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data.sort_values('Country')

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In the next section you’ll learn about calculations over columns.