Pandas Dataframe Sorting

Question

I am trying to sort a Pandas dataframe by a numeric column('Firstgift'), and it appears to be sorting the values by the leading characters from the left:

              ID #   Firstgift Firstgiftdate    Lastgift Lastgiftdate  
180  25,942,055.00   93,000.00     3/27/2015   93,000.00    3/27/2015   
237  25,972,246.00    9,921.26     12/8/2014    9,921.26    12/8/2014   
112  25,836,557.00    9,565.63    12/11/2014    9,565.63   12/11/2014   
49   21,221,574.00    9,340.57     5/27/2015    1,154.00     7/2/2015   
0    20,251,509.00    9,304.58     4/21/2015    9,304.58    4/21/2015   
6    20,780,436.00    8,149.00     5/20/2015    8,149.00    5/20/2015   
430  26,011,859.00    8,000.00    12/28/2014    8,000.00   12/28/2014   
377  26,004,400.00    8,000.00    12/31/2014      100.00    4/28/2015   
227  25,969,658.00   75,000.00      2/6/2015   75,000.00     2/6/2015   
478  26,031,770.00   70,000.00      2/9/2015   70,000.00     2/9/2015   
617  26,100,302.00    7,500.00     4/29/2015    7,500.00    4/29/2015   
677  26,108,994.00    7,500.00      5/4/2015    7,500.00     5/4/2015   
56   21,306,073.00    7,469.08     6/16/2015    7,469.08    6/16/2015   
7    20,780,563.00    7,342.48     5/19/2015    7,342.48    5/19/2015   

Code was:

import pandas as pd
import sklearn 

pd.set_option('display.expand_frame_repr',True)

raw = pd.read_table('MG_FG_TEST.txt',sep="\t")


Firstgift = raw.sort('Firstgift', ascending=False)

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I think you need to use the thousands argument so that pandas reads those numbers in as floats rather than strings:

raw = pd.read_table('MG_FG_TEST.txt',sep="\t",thousands=',')