Pretty-print tabular data in Python.
The main use cases of the library are:
- printing small tables without hassle: just one function call, formatting is guided by the data itself
- authoring tabular data for lightweight plain-text markup: multiple output formats suitable for further editing or transformation
- readable presentation of mixed textual and numeric data: smart column alignment, configurable number formatting, alignment by a decimal point
pip install tabulate
The module provides just one function, tabulate, which takes a
list of lists or another tabular data type as the first argument,
and outputs a nicely formatted plain-text table:
>>> from tabulate import tabulate >>> table = [["Sun",696000,1989100000],["Earth",6371,5973.6], ... ["Moon",1737,73.5],["Mars",3390,641.85]] >>> print tabulate(table) ----- ------ ------------- Sun 696000 1.9891e+09 Earth 6371 5973.6 Moon 1737 73.5 Mars 3390 641.85 ----- ------ -------------
The following tabular data types are supported:
- list of lists or another iterable of iterables
- list or another iterable of dicts (keys as columns)
- dict of iterables (keys as columns)
- two-dimensional NumPy array
- NumPy record arrays (names as columns)
- pandas.DataFrame
Examples in this file use Python2. Tabulate supports Python3 too.
The second optional argument named headers defines a list of
column headers to be used:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers=["Planet","R (km)", "mass (x 10^29 kg)"]) Planet R (km) mass (x 10^29 kg) -------- -------- ------------------- Sun 696000 1.9891e+09 Earth 6371 5973.6 Moon 1737 73.5 Mars 3390 641.85
If headers="firstrow", then the first row of data is used:
>>> print tabulate([["Name","Age"],["Alice",24],["Bob",19]], ... headers="firstrow") Name Age ------ ----- Alice 24 Bob 19
If headers="keys", then the keys of a dictionary/dataframe, or
column indices are used. It also works for NumPy record arrays and
lists of dictionaries or named tuples:
>>> print tabulate({"Name": ["Alice", "Bob"],
... "Age": [24, 19]}, headers="keys")
Age Name
----- ------
24 Alice
19 Bob
There is more than one way to format a table in plain text.
The third optional argument named tablefmt defines
how the table is formatted.
Supported table formats are:
- "plain"
- "simple"
- "grid"
- "pipe"
- "orgtbl"
- "rst"
- "mediawiki"
- "latex"
plain tables do not use any pseudo-graphics to draw lines:
>>> table = [["spam",42],["eggs",451],["bacon",0]] >>> headers = ["item", "qty"] >>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="plain") item qty spam 42 eggs 451 bacon 0
simple is the default format (the default may change in future
versions). It corresponds to simple_tables in Pandoc Markdown
extensions:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="simple") item qty ------ ----- spam 42 eggs 451 bacon 0
grid is like tables formatted by Emacs' table.el
package. It corresponds to grid_tables in Pandoc Markdown
extensions:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="grid") +--------+-------+ | item | qty | +========+=======+ | spam | 42 | +--------+-------+ | eggs | 451 | +--------+-------+ | bacon | 0 | +--------+-------+
pipe follows the conventions of PHP Markdown Extra extension. It
corresponds to pipe_tables in Pandoc. This format uses colons to
indicate column alignment:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="pipe") | item | qty | |:-------|------:| | spam | 42 | | eggs | 451 | | bacon | 0 |
orgtbl follows the conventions of Emacs org-mode, and is editable
also in the minor orgtbl-mode. Hence its name:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="orgtbl") | item | qty | |--------+-------| | spam | 42 | | eggs | 451 | | bacon | 0 |
rst formats data like a simple table of the reStructuredText format:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="rst") ====== ===== item qty ====== ===== spam 42 eggs 451 bacon 0 ====== =====
mediawiki format produces a table markup used in Wikipedia and on
other MediaWiki-based sites:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="mediawiki")
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: left;"
|+ <!-- caption -->
|-
! item !! align="right"| qty
|-
| spam || align="right"| 42
|-
| eggs || align="right"| 451
|-
| bacon || align="right"| 0
|}
latex format creates a tabular environment for LaTeX markup:
>>> print tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt="latex")
\begin{tabular}{lr}
\hline
item & qty \\
\hline
spam & 42 \\
eggs & 451 \\
bacon & 0 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
tabulate is smart about column alignment. It detects columns which
contain only numbers, and aligns them by a decimal point (or flushes
them to the right if they appear to be integers). Text columns are
flushed to the left.
You can override the default alignment with numalign and
stralign named arguments. Possible column alignments are:
right, center, left, decimal (only for numbers), and
None (to disable alignment).
Aligning by a decimal point works best when you need to compare numbers at a glance:
>>> print tabulate([[1.2345],[123.45],[12.345],[12345],[1234.5]])
----------
1.2345
123.45
12.345
12345
1234.5
----------
Compare this with a more common right alignment:
>>> print tabulate([[1.2345],[123.45],[12.345],[12345],[1234.5]], numalign="right") ------ 1.2345 123.45 12.345 12345 1234.5 ------
For tabulate, anything which can be parsed as a number is a
number. Even numbers represented as strings are aligned properly. This
feature comes in handy when reading a mixed table of text and numbers
from a file:
>>> import csv ; from StringIO import StringIO
>>> table = list(csv.reader(StringIO("spam, 42\neggs, 451\n")))
>>> table
[['spam', ' 42'], ['eggs', ' 451']]
>>> print tabulate(table)
---- ----
spam 42
eggs 451
---- ----
tabulate allows to define custom number formatting applied to all
columns of decimal numbers. Use floatfmt named argument:
>>> print tabulate([["pi",3.141593],["e",2.718282]], floatfmt=".4f") -- ------ pi 3.1416 e 2.7183 -- ------
Such features as decimal point alignment and trying to parse everything
as a number imply that tabulate:
- has to "guess" how to print a particular tabular data type
- needs to keep the entire table in-memory
- has to "transpose" the table twice
- does much more work than it may appear
It may not be suitable for serializing really big tables (but who's
going to do that, anyway?) or printing tables in performance sensitive
applications. tabulate is about two orders of magnitude slower
than simply joining lists of values with a tab, coma or other
separator.
In the same time tabulate is comparable to other table
pretty-printers. Given a 10x10 table (a list of lists) of mixed text
and numeric data, tabulate appears to be slower than
asciitable, and faster than PrettyTable and texttable
=========================== ========== =========== Table formatter time, μs rel. time =========================== ========== =========== join with tabs and newlines 22.6 1.0 csv to StringIO 31.6 1.4 asciitable (0.8.0) 777.6 34.4 tabulate (0.7.2) 1374.9 60.9 PrettyTable (0.7.2) 3640.3 161.2 texttable (0.8.1) 3901.3 172.8 =========================== ========== ===========
- 0.7.3: Iterables of dictionaries.
- 0.7.2: Python 3.2 Support.
- 0.7.1: Bug fixes.
tsvformat. Column alignment can be disabled. - 0.7:
latextables. Printing lists of named tuples and NumPy record arrays. Fix printing date and time values. Python <= 2.6.4 is supported. - 0.6:
mediawikitables, bug fixes. - 0.5.1: Fix README.rst formatting. Optimize (performance similar to 0.4.4).
- 0.5: ANSI color sequences. Printing dicts of iterables and Pandas' dataframes.
- 0.4.4: Python 2.6 support.
- 0.4.3: Bug fix, None as a missing value.
- 0.4.2: Fix manifest file.
- 0.4.1: Update license and documentation.
- 0.4: Unicode support, Python3 support,
rsttables. - 0.3: Initial PyPI release. Table formats:
simple,plain,grid,pipe, andorgtbl.
Sergey Astanin, Pau Tallada Crespí, Erwin Marsi, Mik Kocikowski, Bill Ryder, Zach Dwiel.