Chainable Series.set_name()

[wavexx]

It's sometimes convenient to assign/replace the name of a Series, especially if the result is going to be a DataFrame column, for example:

df.groupby([]).size().set_name('GRP_SIZE').reset_index()

This should be as simple as:

def set_name(self, name):
    self.name = name
    return self

Comments?

[jreback]

this is kind of like #9239 functionaility wise
@TomAugspurger

what about having set_meta(name=...) (maybe in addition to this)?

@jorisvandenbossche

[TomAugspurger]

What else would go in set_meta?

And of course, we need to be careful about not modifying the original self.

[jreback]

I think we could move .assign to generic and just have it set the info-items (e.g. columns for frames, items for Panel). I guess then for series it would set elements (e.g. like append). rather than _meta elements (of which name is the only one ATM).

[jreback]

ok, @wavexx want to do a pull-request to add set_name (on Series) only. I think that is fine.

[wavexx]

On 02/16/2015 03:03 PM, jreback wrote:

ok, @wavexx want to do a pull-request to add set_name (on Series) only. I think that is fine.

What about modifying self?
Should we return a copy by default and add an inplace argument as well?

[jreback]

I think this needs to copy by default. Though on a series this is quite cheap (as its a view).

[shoyer]

Another option is to repurpose Series.rename for this instead of adding a new method -- if the argument is a string (or any hashable?), it renames the Series. This is what I chose to do for xray's equivalent of a Series.

This does overload rename to do two (somewhat) different things (often a sign of poor API design), but rename is the obvious place to look for this functionality.

[jreback]

I would be ok with that!

@shoyer it was my thought about too much o reloading
but I agree it does make sense

and already has the inplace option

@wavexx want to do a PR?

[wavexx]

On 02/17/2015 11:54 AM, jreback wrote:

I would be ok with that!

@shoyer it was my thought about too much o reloading
but I agree it does make sense

and already has the inplace option

@wavexx want to do a PR?

I'll give it a shot, but not this week.

[wavexx]

Thanks a lot for this.

[TomAugspurger]

Not a problem. We should have a 0.18 release candidate out soon, if you're willing / able to try it out and report back any bugs!