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# pandas.DataFrame.first

DataFrame.first(offset)

  Select initial periods of time series data based on a date offset.

  Deprecated since version 2.1: `first()` is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Please create a mask and filter using .loc instead.

  For a DataFrame with a sorted DatetimeIndex, this function can select the first few rows based on a date offset.

  Parameters:
    offsetstr, DateOffset or dateutil.relativedelta

      The offset length of the data that will be selected. For instance, ‘1ME’ will display all the rows having their index within the first month.

  Returns:
    Series or DataFrame

      A subset of the caller.

  Raises:
    TypeError

      If the index is not a `DatetimeIndex`

  See also

  `last`

    Select final periods of time series based on a date offset.

  `at_time`

    Select values at a particular time of the day.

  `between_time`

    Select values between particular times of the day.

  Examples

      >>> i = pd.date_range('2018-04-09', periods=4, freq='2D')
      >>> ts = pd.DataFrame({'A': [1, 2, 3, 4]}, index=i)
      >>> ts
                  A
      2018-04-09  1
      2018-04-11  2
      2018-04-13  3
      2018-04-15  4

  Get the rows for the first 3 days:

      >>> ts.first('3D')
                  A
      2018-04-09  1
      2018-04-11  2

  Notice the data for 3 first calendar days were returned, not the first 3 days observed in the dataset, and therefore data for 2018-04-13 was not returned.