Format certain floating dataframe columns into percentage in pandas

The accepted answer suggests to modify the raw data for presentation purposes, something you generally do not want. Imagine you need to make further analyses with these columns and you need the precision you lost with rounding.

You can modify the formatting of individual columns in data frames, in your case:

output = df.to_string(formatters={
    'var1': '{:,.2f}'.format,
    'var2': '{:,.2f}'.format,
    'var3': '{:,.2%}'.format
})
print(output)

For your information '{:,.2%}'.format(0.214) yields 21.40%, so no need for multiplying by 100.

You don't have a nice HTML table anymore but a text representation. If you need to stay with HTML use the to_html function instead.

from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
output = df.to_html(formatters={
    'var1': '{:,.2f}'.format,
    'var2': '{:,.2f}'.format,
    'var3': '{:,.2%}'.format
})
display(HTML(output))

Update

As of pandas 0.17.1, life got easier and we can get a beautiful html table right away:

df.style.format({
    'var1': '{:,.2f}'.format,
    'var2': '{:,.2f}'.format,
    'var3': '{:,.2%}'.format,
})

Often times we are interested in calculating the full significant digits, but for the visual aesthetics, we may want to see only few decimal point when we display the dataframe.

In jupyter-notebook, pandas can utilize the html formatting taking advantage of the method called style.

For the case of just seeing two significant digits of some columns, we can use this code snippet:

Given dataframe

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'var1': [1.458315, 1.576704, 1.629253, 1.6693310000000001, 1.705139, 1.740447, 1.77598, 1.812037, 1.85313, 1.9439849999999999],
          'var2': [1.500092, 1.6084450000000001, 1.652577, 1.685456, 1.7120959999999998, 1.741961, 1.7708009999999998, 1.7993270000000001, 1.8229819999999999, 1.8684009999999998],
          'var3': [-0.0057090000000000005, -0.005122, -0.0047539999999999995, -0.003525, -0.003134, -0.0012230000000000001, -0.0017230000000000001, -0.002013, -0.001396, 0.005732]})

print(df)
       var1      var2      var3
0  1.458315  1.500092 -0.005709
1  1.576704  1.608445 -0.005122
2  1.629253  1.652577 -0.004754
3  1.669331  1.685456 -0.003525
4  1.705139  1.712096 -0.003134
5  1.740447  1.741961 -0.001223
6  1.775980  1.770801 -0.001723
7  1.812037  1.799327 -0.002013
8  1.853130  1.822982 -0.001396
9  1.943985  1.868401  0.005732

Style to get required format

    df.style.format({'var1': "{:.2f}",'var2': "{:.2f}",'var3': "{:.2%}"})

Gives:

     var1   var2    var3
id          
0   1.46    1.50    -0.57%
1   1.58    1.61    -0.51%
2   1.63    1.65    -0.48%
3   1.67    1.69    -0.35%
4   1.71    1.71    -0.31%
5   1.74    1.74    -0.12%
6   1.78    1.77    -0.17%
7   1.81    1.80    -0.20%
8   1.85    1.82    -0.14%
9   1.94    1.87    0.57%

Update

If display command is not found try following:

from IPython.display import display

df_style = df.style.format({'var1': "{:.2f}",'var2': "{:.2f}",'var3': "{:.2%}"})

display(df_style)

Requirements

• To use display command, you need to have installed Ipython in your machine.
• The display command does not work in online python interpreter which do not have IPyton installed such as https://repl.it/languages/python3
• The display command works in jupyter-notebook, jupyter-lab, Google-colab, kaggle-kernels, IBM-watson,Mode-Analytics and many other platforms out of the box, you do not even have to import display from IPython.display

You could also set the default format for float :

pd.options.display.float_format = '{:.2%}'.format

Use '{:.2%}' instead of '{:.2f}%' - The former converts 0.41 to 41.00% (correctly), the latter to 0.41% (incorrectly)

replace the values using the round function, and format the string representation of the percentage numbers:

df['var2'] = pd.Series([round(val, 2) for val in df['var2']], index = df.index)
df['var3'] = pd.Series(["{0:.2f}%".format(val * 100) for val in df['var3']], index = df.index)

The round function rounds a floating point number to the number of decimal places provided as second argument to the function.

String formatting allows you to represent the numbers as you wish. You can change the number of decimal places shown by changing the number before the f.

p.s. I was not sure if your 'percentage' numbers had already been multiplied by 100. If they have then clearly you will want to change the number of decimals displayed, and remove the hundred multiplication.