pandas.Series.array — pandas 3.0.0.dev0+2095.g2e141aaf99 documentation (original) (raw)

property Series.array[source]#

The ExtensionArray of the data backing this Series or Index.

This property provides direct access to the underlying array data of a Series or Index without requiring conversion to a NumPy array. It returns an ExtensionArray, which is the native storage format for pandas extension dtypes.

Returns:

ExtensionArray

An ExtensionArray of the values stored within. For extension types, this is the actual array. For NumPy native types, this is a thin (no copy) wrapper around numpy.ndarray.

.array differs from .values, which may require converting the data to a different form.

Notes

This table lays out the different array types for each extension dtype within pandas.

For any 3rd-party extension types, the array type will be an ExtensionArray.

For all remaining dtypes .array will be aarrays.NumpyExtensionArray wrapping the actual ndarray stored within. If you absolutely need a NumPy array (possibly with copying / coercing data), then use Series.to_numpy() instead.

Examples

For regular NumPy types like int, and float, a NumpyExtensionArray is returned.

pd.Series([1, 2, 3]).array [1, 2, 3] Length: 3, dtype: int64

For extension types, like Categorical, the actual ExtensionArray is returned

ser = pd.Series(pd.Categorical(["a", "b", "a"])) ser.array ['a', 'b', 'a'] Categories (2, object): ['a', 'b']