Professional Tables in Python

Key Takeaways

[Music] what's going on guys welcome back in today's what i'm going to show you how to display beautiful tables in the command line using python and for that we're going to use a module called tabulate so we're going to start by opening up a command line of our choice and we're going to type on windows pip install tabulate or on linux and i think also on mac pip 3 install tabulate and this is going to install the respective module and now all we need to do is we need to import it by saying from tabulate import tabulate and this can be quite useful for those of you who are into data science and work with data sets on a regular basis because this tool allows us to just display data in a table format easily without worrying too much about formatting ourself so let's start with a very simple example let's say we have some table data here and i'm going to use the copilot if it is available to generate some data um it is enabled so let's see if we can do that we're going to start with a very simple thing like name age job is a good suggestion and then we're going to just fill up with some data so for example mike 22 programmer um john 24 teacher uh jane 23 designer jack 25 manager and let's add one more jill 26 programmer so this is an ordinary python list so we have um actually two dimensional lists so we have list inside a list but essentially this is just a basic python list so if we go ahead and print this table data without tabulating so just table data we're going to see that this does not look first of all like a table and even if we do something like four row in table data for column in table data or column in row actually print column and we end without a line break and then every row we make a line break that works but it's still not really beautiful now in this case uh it actually works because the names are all four characters long but if i now change jill to some long name like that you're going to see that the whole table structure is now skewed um and i can try even to do something like okay don't use spaces use tabs for example or something like that or use multiple tabs but at the end of the day it's always different and you need to to consider these things here so it makes more sense to use a module like tabulate to do that and it actually works quite uh simple you just type print and then tabulate now let's turn off the github copilot because otherwise we're going to get suggestions all the time tabulate um and we're going to tabulate the table data and we're going to say the headers so the headers of the table is going to be the first row of um of the table data so this will be taken as the headers we can of course alternatively instead of passing the string also pass a list of um of columns but in this case uh this works and now you can see we have a very basic table here uh that is structured well so we have the necessary uh space here and now we can do is we can also add a table format and we have a lot of different table formats to choose from i recommend if you want to see all of them you go to documentation they have a very um nice section on the different formats here i'm going to show you a couple of them um table format for example we can go with p sql which i think is for postgres sql um and you can see that now it looks like that or we can choose something like uh plane and i think plane removes all all the separators so like that or the one that i uh enjoy probably the most is what was it fancy underscore grit there you go so this actually looks like uh pseudographic so this looks like it is actually a graphic or something but this can be used now quite easily we have also something like html this of course won't print something visual into the command line it's going to give us the html code but what we can do is we can go ahead and say with open and then my table dot html in writing mode s f f dot write tabulate tabulate uh table data and the table format is going to be html now we can run this now we have this html file and i think we should be able to open it in the browser from here so firefox and take some time to load here but there you go you have an html file with the table same can be done uh for la la tech i think this is how it's pronounced uh by the way so essentially we're going to change this to tex and then we have this here simple table so this can be used with ordinary python list but we can also use that with numpy arrays and with pandas data frames but we can also use that with a dictionary so let's start with the dictionaries first let's change all this into a dictionary actually i think we can turn on the autocompletion for that uh let's go with data and then this here and then we can say okay name and mike john jane jackson long name h there you go and then um jump there you go so that's the dictionary we can delete that now and what we can do here is we can say not right but print again and we essentially say okay the data is what we want to print here would want to use here and the headers this time is not going to be first row because we don't have a list we're going to say keys because we want to have the keys off of the dictionary those are going to be the column names and the format is going to be for example again fancy grid there you go works as well and also one option we can add here is show the index uh now we don't have an index right now but we can say show index equals true or actually i think i'm not sure if true is going to work let's see uh actually it works but we can also pass always which is the way that is described in um in the documentation but you can see now we have these indices here all right so let's see that we can also do that in numpy so we can say import numpy as np and import pandas spd for later on um and essentially we can basically just go ahead and say um for numpy let's let's just go with a sampler right here i'm going to call this array equals np array and now we're going to have some sample data one two three um let's do one two three and then four five six and then 789 and then all we want to do is we want to say okay print the array and the headers we can now specify uh a separate list of column names and we're going to just call this call 1 call 2 call 3 and they go that's it essentially and instead of passing this string here we're going to say columns and there you go okay we have a problem what's the problem here oh this of course needs to be in the list itself there you go with the indices now we have the numpy array displayed as a table and last but not least the pandas data frame so let's just keep uh the data that we have here and we're going to say df equals pd data frame of the data so from the dictionary we're going to create uh a pandas data frame and we can now go ahead comment this out and just print the ordinary data frame because the data frame itself already has a way of being printed as a table so you can see that we already have a table like structure but we can still go ahead and print the table or the data frame um using a different format so for example the fancy grid looks better than this in my opinion and here for the columns we just pass or for the headers we pass just keys again and there you go so this is the data frame now displayed in a fancy grid style so that's it for today's udoption joining up you learned something if so let me know by hitting the like button leaving a comment in the comment section down below and of course don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell to not miss a single future video for free other than that thank you much for watching see you next video and bye [Music] you