DataFrame.from_records() KeyError when passed empty list

[pikeas]

What it says on the tin. from_records() fails with a KeyError if passed an empty list. If the list is empty, an empty DataFrame should be created, conforming to the other arguments (columns, etc).

[wesm]

Agreed. Thanks

[changhiskhan]

Which version are you on? This seems to work ok on master:

In [7]: DataFrame.from_records([], index=Index([1,2]))
Out[7]: 
Empty DataFrame
Columns: []
Index: [1, 2]

[pikeas]

pd.DataFrame.from_records([], index='foo', columns=['foo', 'bar'])

Looks like I was inaccurate about the error message thrown. The above throws an IndexError. Version 0.10.0.

[bmampaey]

The problem is not solved if the index is specified as a string

In [1]: from pandas import DataFrame, Index                                          

In [2]: DataFrame.from_records([])                                                   
Out[2]: 
Empty DataFrame
Columns: []
Index: []

In [3]: DataFrame.from_records([], index = Index([1,2]))                             
Out[3]: 
Empty DataFrame
Columns: []
Index: [1, 2]

In [4]: DataFrame.from_records([], index='time') 

blah blah
KeyError: 'time'