tabulate 0.7.2

Headers

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 named tuples:

>>> print tabulate({"Name": ["Alice", "Bob"],
...                 "Age": [24, 19]}, headers="keys")
  Age  Name
-----  ------
   24  Alice
   19  Bob

Table format

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}

Column alignment

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
----  ----

Number formatting

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
--  ------