Fix the TypeError: ‘DataFrame’ object is not callable error in Pandas

DataFrame object is not callable error in Pandas

Often times when working with pandas in Jupyter, Pycharm, VSCode or other IDE, you might have encountered a the following TypeError exception:

TypeError: 'DataFrame' object is not callable

This error is easily fixed by using the brackets notation ( [ ] ) instead of round brackets( ( ) ) when creating a subset of a pandas DataFrame.

Understanding the error

Let’s create a very simple DataFrame from two Python lists:

import pandas as pd

team = ['West', 'East', 'North', 'South']
interviews = [120, 143, 78,  56]

# initializing the DataFrame
hr = pd.DataFrame(dict (team = team, interviews = interviews))

We can look at the DataFrame content by using the head() method:

hr.head()

Here’s our data:

	team	interviews
0	West	120
1	East	143
2	North	78
3	South	56

Now let’s assume that we want to sum the interviews column. We can easily reproduce our error by invoking the following snippet:

hr('interviews').sum()

This trigger the following exception:

Fixing the DataFrame object not callable error

The fix is pretty simple. Use the brackets notation instead of the round brackets to subset the interviews (or for practical purposes – any other column):

hr['interviews'].sum()

This will return the column sum – in our case 397.

Follow up learning

How o solve the import exception modulenotfound for the request library?