ENH: Provide a public version of _get_axis

[michaelquinn32]

Feature Type

• Adding new functionality to pandas

• Changing existing functionality in pandas

• Removing existing functionality in pandas

Problem Description

Many of the axes functions take a string argument along with a positional argument.
https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.set_axis.html

They rely on a private method ._get_axis() in order to support this.

When directly accessing the axes, a user can only get a list and must index that positionally.
https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.axes.html

Feature Description

The only change here is to refactor _get_axis() so that it is public instead of private.

Alternative Solutions

N/A

Additional Context

No response

[phofl]

Hi, thanks for your report.

What are you actually trying to solve? You can simply do df.index or df.columns if you want to use a name?

[michaelquinn32]

Thanks for the quick follow up!

I want to avoid the need to implement some logic myself when the data frame is already doing this in set_axis().

For example, say I want to implement a function that works generically with axes in Python.

I would like

def do_something_to_axis(df: pd.DataFrame, axis: int | str):
  modified_axis = df.get_axis(axis)
  # Do some stuff to the axis
  df.set_axis(modified_axis, axis)
  return df

There already helper functions, like ._get_axis_name() to streamline access within set_axis(). I would like this to be public too.

• pandas/pandas/core/generic.py

  Line 680 in 4ef638a

  def set_axis(

• pandas/pandas/core/generic.py

  Line 519 in 4ef638a

  def _get_axis_number(cls, axis: Axis) -> AxisInt:

I appreciate all of the help with this!