Aliases for column names

When I work with Pandas DataFrames, I prefer to keep the full column names for clarity. So when I print out the head, or use describe, I get a meaningful table. However, this also means I have column names like “Time of Sale” that become annoying to type out.

A nice compromise seems like it would be to have short “aliases” for column names. For instance, I can define the tos average for the above, perhaps like so:

df = pd.read_csv(...)
df.set_alias({'Time of Sale' : 'tos'})

Then, the __get_attribute__ method can look up aliases in addition to column names, so I can refer to that column simply as df.tos. But for all other purposes, the columns name is still the descriptive full name.

Would this make sense?

[KeithWM]

I’d also like to see such a feature. For me the favourite use case would be to have nice, legible axes labels (with units) in seaborn plots. I know one can manually set the axis labels, but I find this error prone, too verbose and it leads to code duplication.

If you ask me, the easier way would be to keep the current name in the role of an alias as @bbirand proposes, and to add some other field for a longer name, which can default to the “normal” name if none is explicitly given.

[ajeet2808]

Any update on this feature?