QST: Use object property as key?

[DorianCzichotzki]

Is there a way to use a property of an object as the key when providing the object to a DataFrame?
I think the code makes clearer what I am looking for.

class Key:
  def __init__(self, name: str):
    self.name = name
  
  # Something like that
  def __pandas_key__(self):
    return self.name

df = DataFrame({"col": [1,2,3,4]})
key = Key("col")

df[key] # is [1,2,3,4]

[jbrockmendel]

No, but I think if you do df = pd.DataFrame({key: [1, 2, 3, 4]}) then df[key] works just fine

Longer term, #11723 might make this feasible.

[TomAugspurger]

This would be subsumed by #11723, so let's have the discussion there.