[Python] How to create non-alphabetically ordered Categorical column in Polars Dataframe?

In Pandas, you can create an "ordered" Categorical column from existing string column as follows:

column_values_with_custom_order = ["B", "A", "C"]

df["Column"] = pd.Categorical(df.Column, categories=column_values_with_custom_order, ordered=True)


In Polars documentation, I couldn't find such way to create ordered columns. However, I could reproduce this by using pl.from_pandas(df) so I suspect that this is possible with Polars as well.

What would be the recommended way to this?

I tried to create new column with:

polars_df.with_columns(col("Column").cast(pl.Categorical))


but I don't know how to include the custom ordering to this.

I also checked In polars, can I create a categorical type with levels myself?, but I would prefer not to add another column to my Dataframe only for ordering.

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