Description
Pandas version checks
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I have checked that this issue has not already been reported.
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I have confirmed this bug exists on the latest version of pandas.
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I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.
Reproducible Example
On pandas < 2.1 (e.g. 1.5.3, 2.0.3):
import pandas as pd
pd.Series(['a'], name='hi').to_pickle('G:/temp/test.pkl')On pandas 2.3.0 and main:
import pandas as pd
ser = pd.read_pickle('G:/temp/test.pkl') # appears to work
ser2 = pd.Series(['a'], name='hi') # works
pd.testing.assert_series_equal(ser, ser2) # works
pd.testing.assert_series_equal(ser, ser.copy()) # Attribute "name" are differentIssue Description
In doing a migration from 1.5.3 to the 2.x series we hit an issue where copying an unpickled Series drops its name (the actual operation was a .reindex_like, which called .copy under the hood). The bug begins with the pandas 2.1 series; I believe this may have been introduced in #51784 when the Series metadata was changed from name to _name.
Expected Behavior
It seems like an unpickled Series and its copy should be equal in all attributes, since that's what .copy does. However anything which does a copy (including implicit copies, such as calling .reindex()) currently causes the name to be dropped inadvertently.
Now I'm not sure to what extent read_pickle guarantees that all actions on an unpickled legacy object work the same way on a newly-created object. That said, one reason this may be worth fixing is that the problem seems to persist in new versions, i.e. rewriting the pickle with the new version directly doesn't mitigate the problem:
# using version 2.3.0
# read legacy pickle
ser = pd.read_pickle('G:/temp/test.pkl')
# write out new pickle of the object
ser.to_pickle('G:/temp/ser_copy.pkl')
# read in new pickle
ser_copy = pd.read_pickle('G:/temp/ser_copy.pkl')
pd.testing.assert_series_equal(ser, ser_copy) # works
pd.testing.assert_series_equal(ser_copy, ser_copy.copy()) # fails, even though ser_copy is read in from a pickle created in 2.3.0)And of course obviously calling ser.copy() to get a new pandas 2.3 object also does not work.
Thus it seems the only workaround to:
- Read in the legacy pickle
- Serialize the legacy pickle to some other format
- Deserialize the other format
- Serialize the newly-created object as a replacement pickle
Installed Versions
INSTALLED VERSIONS
commit : 2cc3762
python : 3.11.12
python-bits : 64
OS : Windows
OS-release : 10
Version : 10.0.19045
machine : AMD64
processor : Intel64 Family 6 Model 158 Stepping 10, GenuineIntel
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : None
LOCALE : English_United States.1252
pandas : 2.3.0
numpy : 2.2.6
pytz : 2025.2
dateutil : 2.9.0.post0
pip : 25.1.1
Cython : None
sphinx : None
IPython : 9.3.0
adbc-driver-postgresql: None
adbc-driver-sqlite : None
bs4 : 4.13.4
blosc : None
bottleneck : 1.5.0
dataframe-api-compat : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : 2025.5.1
html5lib : None
hypothesis : None
gcsfs : None
jinja2 : 3.1.6
lxml.etree : 5.4.0
matplotlib : 3.10.3
numba : 0.61.2+0.g1e70d8ceb.dirty
numexpr : 2.10.2
odfpy : None
openpyxl : 3.1.5
pandas_gbq : None
psycopg2 : None
pymysql : None
pyarrow : 19.0.1
pyreadstat : None
pytest : 8.4.1
python-calamine : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : 2025.5.1
scipy : 1.15.2
sqlalchemy : 2.0.41
tables : None
tabulate : 0.9.0
xarray : 2025.6.1
xlrd : None
xlsxwriter : 3.2.5
zstandard : 0.23.0
tzdata : 2025.2
qtpy : None
pyqt5 : None