What's the difference between .col and ['col'] in pandas

Question

I've been using pandas for a little while now and I've realised that I use

 df.col
 df['col'] 

interchangeably. Are they actually the same or am I missing something?

Answer 1

Following on from the link in the comments.

df.col 

Simply refers to an attribute of the dataframe, similar to say

df.shape

Now if 'col' is a column name in the dataframe then accessing this attribute returns the column as series. This sometimes will be sufficient but

df['col']

will always work, and can also be used to add a new column to a dataframe.