Stop jupyter notebook wrapping cell contents in pandas html table output

Question

The pandas option max_colwidth controls how many characters will be included in the repr of a dataframe:

import string, random
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase + ' ') for j in range(1000)) for i in range(4)])

pd.options.display.max_colwidth = 10
print(df)

yields

           0
0  lmftge...
1  pqttqb...
2  wi wgy...
3  ow dip...

and

pd.options.display.max_colwidth = 30
print(df)

yields

                               0
0  lmftgenioerszvgzfaxorzciow...
1  pqttqbqqe pykgguxnjsspbcti...
2  wi wgybtgcbxkobrwnaxpxwsjc...
3  ow dippaiamvvcofvousieckko...

And you can set pd.options.display.max_colwidth = 0 to remove the limit altogether. Fine so far!

But if the dataframe is rendered in HTML inside a notebook, the notebook will wrap the table of the column to the width of the display, regardless of this setting:

Is there any way to avoid this, i.e. to have the HTML table column rendered as wide as is necessary to fit the each row on a single line?

More generally, is it possible to control the width of HTML table columns in notebook output independent of the number of characters in the pandas output?

Answer 1

Building on Ben's answer, but without needing to go into the custom css files, which work differently for juptyter lab.

Just put this in a cell and run it:

%%html
<style>
.dataframe td {
    white-space: nowrap;
}
</style>