Retrieving .loc index values in pandas dataframe

Question

I have a dataframe which uses the date column of each row as a .loc index. See below ``` >>> aapl.head() Open High Low Close Volume Adj Close Date 1980-12-12 28.75 28.88 28.75 28.75 16751200 3.15 1980-12-15 27.38 27.38 27.25 27.25 6281600 2.99 1980-12-16 25.38 25.38 25.25 25.25 3776000 2.77 1980-12-17 25.88 26.00 25.88 25.88 3087200 2.84 1980-12-18 26.62 26.75 26.62 26.62 2623200 2.92 [5 rows x 6 columns] ``` I am trying to retrieve the date of the first row, however (I assume it's because date is used as the index), the good ol' `date=aapl.iloc[0]['Date']` doesn't work...though it does work for any other column. My question is, specifically, how can I retrieve the date value for the first row? That is to say, in general terms, how do I retrieve the .loc index of the first row of a dataframe? Thanks in advance; help much appreciated.

Accepted Answer

You need to access the index of the data frame, not the columns. To do this you can do the following:

```
DF.index[x]
```

So in your case:

```
appl.index[0]
```

Incidentally if you want to get 'Date' out of the index, so you can reference it in the way you are accustomed to (i.e. as a column) you can reset the index:

```
appl.reset_index(inplace = True)
```

And then if you decide you don't like that you can just change it back:

```
appl.set_index('Date', inplace = True)
```

Retrieving .loc index values in pandas dataframe

Solution

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