I am working with a Pandas DataFrame that contains optimization results from HOMER software. I am encountering a ValueError indicating that the column label ‘NPC’ is not unique when I attempt to sort and select columns. Despite efforts to handle duplicate column names, the error persists.

this is the image that describes the problem that i am facing

What I Tried:

1. Removing Duplicate Columns:
   I tried using the following code to remove duplicate column names:

homer_results.columns = homer_results.columns.str.strip() homer_results = homer_results.loc[:, ~homer_results.columns.duplicated()]
2. Data Inspection:
I manually inspected the DataFrame and confirmed that there were duplicate column names.

3. Code to Sort and Select Columns:
   The problematic code where the error occurs is:
   optimal_solutions = homer_results[['NPC'] + target_columns].sort_values(by='NPC').head(10)
   I expected the DataFrame to sort by the ‘NPC’ column and to select the top 10 rows based on this sorted order. The DataFrame should then display the optimal solutions without any errors related to duplicate column labels.