🪅Choosing between loc and iloc

When choosing or transitioning between loc and iloc, there is one "gotcha" worth keeping in mind, which is that the two methods use slightly different indexing schemes.

iloc uses the Python stdlib indexing scheme, where the first element of the range is included and the last one excluded. So 0:10 will select entries 0,...,9. loc, meanwhile, indexes inclusively. So 0:10 will select entries 0,...,10.

Why the change? Remember that loc can index any stdlib type: strings, for example. If we have a DataFrame with index values Apples, ..., Potatoes, ..., and we want to select "all the alphabetical fruit choices between Apples and Potatoes", then it's a heck of a lot more convenient to index df.loc['Apples':'Potatoes'] than it is to index something like df.loc['Apples', 'Potatoet'] (t coming after s in the alphabet).

This is particularly confusing when the DataFrame index is a simple numerical list, e.g. 0,...,1000. In this case df.iloc[0:1000] will return 1000 entries, while df.loc[0:1000] return 1001 of them! To get 1000 elements using iloc, you will need to go one higher and ask for df.iloc[0:1001].