Is there a way to copy only the structure (not the data) of a Pandas DataFrame?

Question

I received a DataFrame from somewhere and want to create another DataFrame with the same number and names of columns and rows (indexes). For example, suppose that the original data frame was created as

import pandas as pd

df1 = pd.DataFrame([[11,12],[21,22]], columns=['c1','c2'], index=['i1','i2'])

I copied the structure by explicitly defining the columns and names:

df2 = pd.DataFrame(columns=df1.columns, index=df1.index)    

I don't want to copy the data, otherwise I could just write df2 = df1.copy(). In other words, after df2 being created it must contain only NaN elements:

In [1]: df1

Out[1]: 

    c1  c2

i1  11  12

i2  21  22

In [2]: df2

Out[2]: 

     c1   c2

i1  NaN  NaN

i2  NaN  NaN

Is there a more idiomatic way of doing it?

Answer 1

You can simply mask by notna() i.e

df1 = pd.DataFrame([[11, 12], [21, 22]], columns=['c1', 'c2'], index=['i1', 'i2'])

df2 = df1.mask(df1.notna())

    c1  c2

i1 NaN NaN

i2 NaN NaN

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