How can I pretty-print ASCII tables with Python?
I'm looking for a way to pretty-print tables like this:
=======================
| column 1 | column 2 |
=======================
| value1 | value2 |
| value3 | value4 |
=======================
I've found the asciitable library but it doesn't do the borders, etc. I don't need any complex formatting of data items, they're just strings. I do need it to auto-size columns.
Do other libraries or methods exist, or do I need to spend a few minutes writing my own?
Answer
I've read this question long time ago, and finished writing my own pretty-printer for tables: tabulate.
My use case is:
- I want a one-liner most of the time
- which is smart enough to figure the best formatting for me
- and can output different plain-text formats
Given your example, grid is probably the most similar output format:
from tabulate import tabulate
print tabulate([["value1", "value2"], ["value3", "value4"]], ["column 1", "column 2"], tablefmt="grid")
+------------+------------+
| column 1 | column 2 |
+============+============+
| value1 | value2 |
+------------+------------+
| value3 | value4 |
+------------+------------+
Other supported formats are plain (no lines), simple (Pandoc simple tables), pipe (like tables in PHP Markdown Extra), orgtbl (like tables in Emacs' org-mode), rst (like simple tables in reStructuredText). grid and orgtbl are easily editable in Emacs.
Performance-wise, tabulate is slightly slower than asciitable, but much faster than PrettyTable and texttable.
P.S. I'm also a big fan of aligning numbers by a decimal column. So this is the default alignment for numbers if there are any (overridable).