Is it possible to use idxmax() as an argument in a function?-CodePudding

I've been using idx.max() to get the most common value, after using value_counts(), for each column in a pandas dataframe. But I'd like to use this within a function as an argument, and specify either idxmax() or idxmin().

This code works fine and gives me the output I would like

test = ['00100',
'11110',
'10110',
'10111',
'10101',
'01111',
'00111',
'11100',
'10000',
'11001',
'00010',
'01010']

split_lines = [list(x) for x in test]
inp = pd.DataFrame(split_lines)

def get_binary(x,y):
    df = x
    b = []
    for col in df.columns:
        res = df[col].value_counts()

        if res[0] == res[1]:
            b.append(y)
        else:
            b.append(res.idxmax())

        df = df[df[col] == b[col]]

    return b


answer = get_binary(inp, '1')
print(answer)

output
['1', '0', '1', '1', '1']

However this doesn't work

def get_binary(x,y,z):
    df = x
    b = []
    for col in df.columns:
        res = df[col].value_counts()

        if res[0] == res[1]:
            b.append(y)
        else:
            b.append(z)

        df = df[df[col] == b[col]]

    return b


answer = get_binary(inp, '1', 'res.idxmax()')

and returns the error

  File "<input>", line 17, in <module>
  File "<input>", line 7, in get_binary
  File "/Users/user/adventofcode/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pandas/core/series.py", line 939, in __getitem__
    return self._values[key]
IndexError: index 0 is out of bounds for axis 0 with size 0

Any help appreciated!

CodePudding user response：

I am not sure why you want to do this, but yes, you can, using __getattribute__:

def get_binary(x,y,z):
    ....
    if res[0] == res[1]:
        b.append(y)
    else:
        b.append(res.__getattribute__(z)())
    ....

Calling:

answer = get_binary(inp, '1', 'idxmax')

This method works only in Python-3.x.