Things Which Should Be Obvious in Pandas, But Aren't

I have been brushing up on my pandas skills lately. This post records some details which surprised me.

Printing the first value of a Series and its index.

It appears that pandas gives different output depending on whether it thinks you are looking for multiple values from a Series, or just one. But if you want the output style for multiple values applied to just a single value, you need to trick it by using syntax which would normally only apply for getting multiple values.

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> a = pd.Series([1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9])
>>> print(a[:2])
0    1
1    2
dtype: int64
>>> print(a[0])
1
>>> print(a[:1])
0    1
dtype: int64
>>> a.head(1)
0    1
dtype: int64