How do you extract a column from a multi-dimensional array?

Could it be that you're using a NumPy array? Python has the array module, but that does not support multi-dimensional arrays. Normal Python lists are single-dimensional too.

However, if you have a simple two-dimensional list like this:

A = [[1,2,3,4],
     [5,6,7,8]]

then you can extract a column like this:

def column(matrix, i):
    return [row[i] for row in matrix]

Extracting the second column (index 1):

>>> column(A, 1)
[2, 6]

Or alternatively, simply:

>>> [row[1] for row in A]
[2, 6]

>>> x = arange(20).reshape(4,5)
>>> x array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3,  4],
        [ 5,  6,  7,  8,  9],
        [10, 11, 12, 13, 14],
        [15, 16, 17, 18, 19]])

if you want the second column you can use

>>> x[:, 1]
array([ 1,  6, 11, 16])

If you have a two-dimensional array in Python (not numpy), you can extract all the columns like so,

data = [
['a', 1, 2], 
['b', 3, 4], 
['c', 5, 6]
]

columns = list(zip(*data))

print("column[0] = {}".format(columns[0]))
print("column[1] = {}".format(columns[1]))
print("column[2] = {}".format(columns[2]))

Executing this code will yield,

>>> print("column[0] = {}".format(columns[0]))
column[0] = ('a', 'b', 'c')

>>> print("column[1] = {}".format(columns[1]))
column[1] = (1, 3, 5)

>>> print("column[2] = {}".format(columns[2]))
column[2] = (2, 4, 6)

def get_col(arr, col):
    return map(lambda x : x[col], arr)

a = [[1,2,3,4], [5,6,7,8], [9,10,11,12],[13,14,15,16]]

print get_col(a, 3)

map function in Python is another way to go.

array = [[1,2,3,4],[5,6,7,8],[9,10,11,12],[13,14,15,16]]

col1 = [val[1] for val in array]
col2 = [val[2] for val in array]
col3 = [val[3] for val in array]
col4 = [val[4] for val in array]
print(col1)
print(col2)
print(col3)
print(col4)

Output:
[1, 5, 9, 13]
[2, 6, 10, 14]
[3, 7, 11, 15]
[4, 8, 12, 16]

The itemgetter operator can help too, if you like map-reduce style python, rather than list comprehensions, for a little variety!

# tested in 2.4
from operator import itemgetter
def column(matrix,i):
    f = itemgetter(i)
    return map(f,matrix)

M = [range(x,x+5) for x in range(10)]
assert column(M,1) == range(1,11)

Just use transpose(), then you can get the columns as easy as you get rows

matrix=np.array(originalMatrix).transpose()
print matrix[NumberOfColumns]

If you want to grab more than just one column just use slice:

 a = np.array([[1, 2, 3],[4, 5, 6],[7, 8, 9]])
    print(a[:, [1, 2]])
[[2 3]
[5 6]
[8 9]]