idxmin work on object types? (original) (raw)

numeric_only=True flag to min,max,idxmax,idxmin to select out numeric only
fix idxmax on object dtypes (related to BUG: min on non-numeric data with nans #4147)

related is #6287

Just happened to come across this. Related to #2982

df = pd.DataFrame([["zimm", 2.5],["biff", 1.],["bid", 12.]])

This is fine (I was surprised it worked for objects)

This falls down

I'd be fine if there's a strong performance reason not to support this, though it would be nice to not return an error at least. Maybe a stop-gap solution is to only return a solution for numeric types similar to the quantiles method.