[FIXED] How can I left justify text in a pandas DataFrame column in an IPython notebook

Issue

I am trying to format the output in an IPython notebook. I tried using the to_string function, and this neatly lets me eliminate the index column. But the textual data is right justified.

In [10]:

import pandas as pd
columns = ['Text', 'Value']
a = pd.DataFrame ({'Text': ['abcdef', 'x'], 'Value': [12.34, 4.2]})
print (a.to_string (index=False))

   Text  Value
 abcdef  12.34
      x   4.20

The same is true when just printing the dataframe.

In [12]:

print (a)

     Text  Value
0  abcdef  12.34
1       x   4.20

The justify argument in the to_string function, surprisingly, only justifies the column heading.

In [13]:

import pandas as pd
columns = ['Text', 'Value']
a = pd.DataFrame ({'Text': ['abcdef', 'x'], 'Value': [12.34, 4.2]})
print (a.to_string (justify='left', index=False))
Text     Value
 abcdef  12.34
      x   4.20

How can I control the justification settings for individual columns?

Solution

If you're willing to use another library, tabulate will do this -

$ pip install tabulate

and then

from tabulate import tabulate
df = pd.DataFrame ({'Text': ['abcdef', 'x'], 'Value': [12.34, 4.2]})
print(tabulate(df, showindex=False, headers=df.columns))

Text      Value
------  -------
abcdef    12.34
x          4.2

It has various other output formats also.

Answered By - Brian Burns