How can I manage units in pandas data?

There isn’t any great way to do this right now, see github issue here for some discussion.

As a quick hack, could do something like this, maintaining a separate dict with the units.

In [3]: units = {}

In [5]: newcols = []
   ...: for col in df:
   ...:     name, unit = col.split(' ')
   ...:     units[name] = unit
   ...:     newcols.append(name)

In [6]: df.columns = newcols

In [7]: df
Out[7]:
   length  width  thickness
0     1.2    3.4        5.6
1     7.8    9.0        1.2
2     3.4    5.6        7.8

In [8]: units['length']
Out[8]: '(m)'