`set_sorted` when a dataframe is sorted on multiple columns - python-polars

Question

I have some panel data in polars. The dataframe is sorted by its id column and then its date column (basically it's a bunch of time series concatenated together).
I've seen that polars has a .set_sorted method for working with expressions. I can of course set pl.col("id").set_sorted() but I want it to be aware that it's actually sorted in both id and date columns. In pandas I know the Index has an .is_monotonic_increasing property that is aware of whether all the columns of the Index are sorted but is there a way to do something similar with polars?

Answer 1

Have you tried
df.get_column('id').is_sorted()
and
df.get_column('date').is_sorted()
to see if they're each already known to be sorted?
For instance if I do:
df=pl.DataFrame({'a':[1,1,2,2], 'b':[1,2,3,4]})
df.get_column('a').is_sorted()
df.get_column('b').is_sorted()
Then I get 2 Trues even though I haven't ever told it that the columns are sorted.
In general, I don't think you want to be manually setting columns as sorted. Just sort them and it'll keep track of the fact that they're sorted.
If you do:
df=pl.DataFrame({'a':[1,2,1,2], 'b':[1,3,2,4]})
df.get_column('a').is_sorted()
df.get_column('b').is_sorted()
then you get False twice, as you'd hope. If you then do df=df.sort(['a','b']) and follow it up by checking the sortedness of a and b again then you see that it knows they're sorted