Delete column from pandas DataFrame in python

Question

When deleting a column in a DataFrame I use:

del df['column_name']

And this works great. Why can't I use the following?

del df.column_name

Since it is possible to access the column/Series as df.column_name, I expected this to work.

Answer 1

As you've guessed, the right syntax is

del df['column_name']

It's difficult to make del df.column_name work simply as the result of syntactic limitations in Python. del df[name] gets translated to df.__delitem__(name) under the covers by Python.