Pandas - Inplace, View, Copy Confusion

I'm having an issue with Pandas dataframes. It seems that Pandas/Python generate a copy of the DF somewhere in my code as opposed to performing the modifications to the original DF

Solution 1:

I think when you do:

df = df[df['file_exists'] != False]

You've created a copy of the original df.

To make it work, you can change your function to:

def clean_df2(df): #remove non-existing files from DF
    df['file_exists'] = True # add column, set all to True?
    .....
    return df

And when you call clean_df2(df), do the following:

df = clean_df2(df)