To get basic information about a DataFrame including the column names and datatypes:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'integers': [1, 2, 3], 
                   'floats': [1.5, 2.5, 3], 
                   'text': ['a', 'b', 'c'], 
                   'ints with None': [1, None, 3]})

df.info()
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 3 entries, 0 to 2
Data columns (total 4 columns):
floats            3 non-null float64
integers          3 non-null int64
ints with None    2 non-null float64
text              3 non-null object
dtypes: float64(2), int64(1), object(1)
memory usage: 120.0+ bytes

To get the memory usage of the DataFrame:

>>> df.info(memory_usage='deep')
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 3 entries, 0 to 2
Data columns (total 4 columns):
floats            3 non-null float64
integers          3 non-null int64
ints with None    2 non-null float64
text              3 non-null object
dtypes: float64(2), int64(1), object(1)
memory usage: 234.0 bytes

df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1, 2, 3], 'b': [4, 5, 6], 'c': [7, 8, 9]})

To list the column names in a DataFrame:

>>> list(df)
['a', 'b', 'c']

This list comprehension method is especially useful when using the debugger:

>>> [c for c in df]
['a', 'b', 'c']

This is the long way:

sampledf.columns.tolist()

You can also print them as an index instead of a list (this won't be very visible for dataframes with many columns though):

df.columns

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(5, 5), columns=list('ABCDE'))

To generate various summary statistics. For numeric values the number of non-NA/null values (count), the mean (mean), the standard deviation std and values known as the five-number summary :

• min: minimum (smallest observation)
• 25%: lower quartile or first quartile (Q1)
• 50%: median (middle value, Q2)
• 75%: upper quartile or third quartile (Q3)
• max: maximum (largest observation)

>>> df.describe()
              A         B         C         D         E
count  5.000000  5.000000  5.000000  5.000000  5.000000
mean  -0.456917 -0.278666  0.334173  0.863089  0.211153
std    0.925617  1.091155  1.024567  1.238668  1.495219
min   -1.494346 -2.031457 -0.336471 -0.821447 -2.106488
25%   -1.143098 -0.407362 -0.246228 -0.087088 -0.082451
50%   -0.536503 -0.163950 -0.004099  1.509749  0.313918
75%    0.092630  0.381407  0.120137  1.822794  1.060268
max    0.796729  0.828034  2.137527  1.891436  1.870520