python - Get list from pandas DataFrame column headers

Question

I want to get a list of the column headers from a pandas DataFrame. The DataFrame will come from user input so I won't know how many columns there will be or what they will be called.

For example, if I'm given a DataFrame like this:

>>> my_dataframe
    y  gdp  cap
0   1    2    5
1   2    3    9
2   8    7    2
3   3    4    7
4   6    7    7
5   4    8    3
6   8    2    8
7   9    9   10
8   6    6    4
9  10   10    7

I would get a list like this:

>>> header_list
['y', 'gdp', 'cap']

Answer 1

You can get the values as a list by doing:

list(my_dataframe.columns.values)

Also you can simply use: (as shown in Ed Chum's answer):

list(my_dataframe)