Capitalize first letter of a column in Pandas dataframe

Analyzing real-world data is somewhat difficult because we need to take various things into consideration. Apart from getting the useful data from large datasets, keeping data in required format is also very important.

One might encounter a situation where we need to capitalize any specific column in given dataframe. Let’s see how can we capitalize first letter of a column in Pandas dataframe.

Let’s create a dataframe from the dict of lists.

# Create a simple dataframe

# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd


# creating a dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame({'A': ['john', 'bODAY', 'minA', 'Peter', 'nicky'],
                  'B': ['masters', 'graduate', 'graduate',
                                   'Masters', 'Graduate'],
                  'C': [27, 23, 21, 23, 24]})

df

Output:

There are certain methods we can change/modify the case of column in pandas dataframe. Let’s see how can we capitalize first letter of columns using capitalize() method.

Method #1:

# Create a simple dataframe

# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd


# creating a dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame({'A': ['john', 'bODAY', 'minA', 'Peter', 'nicky'],
                  'B': ['masters', 'graduate', 'graduate',
                                   'Masters', 'Graduate'],
                  'C': [27, 23, 21, 23, 24]})

df['A'] = df['A'].str.capitalize()

df

Output:


Method #2: Using lambda with capitalize() method

# Create a simple dataframe

# importing pandas as pd
import pandas as pd


# creating a dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame({'A': ['john', 'bODAY', 'minA', 'Peter', 'nicky'],
                  'B': ['masters', 'graduate', 'graduate',
                                   'Masters', 'Graduate'],
                  'C': [27, 23, 21, 23, 24]})

df['A'].apply(lambda x: x.capitalize())

Output: