pandas three-way joining multiple dataframes on columns

Solution 1:

Assumed imports:

import pandas as pd

John Galt's answer is basically a reduce operation. If I have more than a handful of dataframes, I'd put them in a list like this (generated via list comprehensions or loops or whatnot):

dfs = [df0, df1, df2, dfN]

Assuming they have some common column, like name in your example, I'd do the following:

df_final = reduce(lambda left,right: pd.merge(left,right,on='name'), dfs)

That way, your code should work with whatever number of dataframes you want to merge.

Edit August 1, 2016: For those using Python 3: reduce has been moved into functools. So to use this function, you'll first need to import that module:

from functools import reduce

Solution 2:

You could try this if you have 3 dataframes

# Merge multiple dataframes
df1 = pd.DataFrame(np.array([
    ['a', 5, 9],
    ['b', 4, 61],
    ['c', 24, 9]]),
    columns=['name', 'attr11', 'attr12'])
df2 = pd.DataFrame(np.array([
    ['a', 5, 19],
    ['b', 14, 16],
    ['c', 4, 9]]),
    columns=['name', 'attr21', 'attr22'])
df3 = pd.DataFrame(np.array([
    ['a', 15, 49],
    ['b', 4, 36],
    ['c', 14, 9]]),
    columns=['name', 'attr31', 'attr32'])

pd.merge(pd.merge(df1,df2,on='name'),df3,on='name')

alternatively, as mentioned by cwharland

df1.merge(df2,on='name').merge(df3,on='name')