Use a list of values to select rows from a pandas dataframe

First let's create a data frame with values.

 
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
df = pd.DataFrame()
df['Name'] = ['John', 'Doe', 'Bill','Jim','Harry','Ben']
df['TotalMarks'] = [82, 38, 63,22,55,40]
df['Grade'] = ['A', 'E', 'B','E','C','D']
df['Promoted'] = [True, False,True,False,True,True]
df

 
    Name  TotalMarks Grade  Promoted
0   John          82     A      True
1    Doe          38     E     False
2   Bill          63     B      True
3    Jim          22     E     False
4  Harry          55     C      True
5    Ben          40     D      True

Create a list of values for select rows:

 
lst = ['Doe', 'Bill', 'Ben']

You can use isin([]) method to select rows from DataFrame:

 
df[df['Name'].isin(lst)]

 
   Name  TotalMarks Grade  Promoted
1   Doe          38     E     False
2  Bill          63     B      True
5   Ben          40     D      True

str.contain()

isin() is ideal if you have a list of exact matches in DataFrame , but if you have a list of partial matches or substrings to look for, you can filter using the str.contains() method.

 
df[df['Name'].str.contains('B')]

 
   Name  TotalMarks Grade  Promoted
2  Bill          63     B      True
5   Ben          40     D      True

Next : How to iterate over rows in a DataFrame in Pandas