Q:

Pandas: How to read rows from CSV or Excel file?

It seems that you can look at columns in a file no problem, but there's no apparent way to look at rows. I know I can read the entire file (CSV or excel) into a crazy huge dataframe in order to select rows, but I'd rather be able to grab particular rows straight from the file and store those in a reasonably sized dataframe.
I do realize that I could just transpose/pivot the df before saving it to the aforementioned CVS/Excel file. This would be a problem for Excel because I'd run out of columns (the transposed rows) far too quickly. I'd rather use Excel than CSV.
My original, not transposed data file has 9000+ rows and 20ish cols. I'm using Excel 2003 which supports up to 256 columns.
EDIT: Figured out a solution that works for me. It's a lot simpler than I expected. I did end up using CSV instead of Excel (I found no serious difference in terms of my project) Here it is for whoever may have the same problem:
import pandas as pd
selectionList = (2, 43, 792, 4760) #rows to select
df = pd.read_csv(your_csv_file, index_col=0).T
selection = {}

for item in selectionList:
    selection[item] = df[item]

selection = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(selection)
selection.T.to_csv(your_path)

A:

I think you can use the skiprows and nrows arguments in pandas.read_csv to pick out individual rows to read in.
With skiprows, you can provide it a long list (0 indexed) of rows not to import , e.g. [0,5,6,10].  That might end up being a huge list though.  If you provide it a single integer, it will skip that number of rows and start reading.  Set nrows to whatever to pick up the number of rows you want at the point where you have it start.
If I've misunderstood the issue, let me know.

