How can I pretty-print ASCII tables with Python?

I too wrote my own solution to this. I tried to keep it simple.

https://github.com/Robpol86/terminaltables

from terminaltables import AsciiTable
table_data = [
    ['Heading1', 'Heading2'],
    ['row1 column1', 'row1 column2'],
    ['row2 column1', 'row2 column2']
]
table = AsciiTable(table_data)
print table.table
+--------------+--------------+
| Heading1     | Heading2     |
+--------------+--------------+
| row1 column1 | row1 column2 |
| row2 column1 | row2 column2 |
+--------------+--------------+

table.inner_heading_row_border = False
print table.table
+--------------+--------------+
| Heading1     | Heading2     |
| row1 column1 | row1 column2 |
| row2 column1 | row2 column2 |
+--------------+--------------+

table.inner_row_border = True
table.justify_columns[1] = 'right'
table.table_data[1][1] += '\nnewline'
print table.table
+--------------+--------------+
| Heading1     |     Heading2 |
+--------------+--------------+
| row1 column1 | row1 column2 |
|              |      newline |
+--------------+--------------+
| row2 column1 | row2 column2 |
+--------------+--------------+

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).

For some reason when I included 'docutils' in my google searches I stumbled across texttable, which seems to be what I'm looking for.

Here's a quick and dirty little function I wrote for displaying the results from SQL queries I can only make over a SOAP API. It expects an input of a sequence of one or more namedtuples as table rows. If there's only one record, it prints it out differently.

It is handy for me and could be a starting point for you:

def pprinttable(rows):
  if len(rows) > 1:
    headers = rows[0]._fields
    lens = []
    for i in range(len(rows[0])):
      lens.append(len(max([x[i] for x in rows] + [headers[i]],key=lambda x:len(str(x)))))
    formats = []
    hformats = []
    for i in range(len(rows[0])):
      if isinstance(rows[0][i], int):
        formats.append("%%%dd" % lens[i])
      else:
        formats.append("%%-%ds" % lens[i])
      hformats.append("%%-%ds" % lens[i])
    pattern = " | ".join(formats)
    hpattern = " | ".join(hformats)
    separator = "-+-".join(['-' * n for n in lens])
    print hpattern % tuple(headers)
    print separator
    _u = lambda t: t.decode('UTF-8', 'replace') if isinstance(t, str) else t
    for line in rows:
        print pattern % tuple(_u(t) for t in line)
  elif len(rows) == 1:
    row = rows[0]
    hwidth = len(max(row._fields,key=lambda x: len(x)))
    for i in range(len(row)):
      print "%*s = %s" % (hwidth,row._fields[i],row[i])

Sample output:

pkid                                 | fkn                                  | npi
-------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+----
405fd665-0a2f-4f69-7320-be01201752ec | 8c9949b9-552e-e448-64e2-74292834c73e | 0
5b517507-2a42-ad2e-98dc-8c9ac6152afa | f972bee7-f5a4-8532-c4e5-2e82897b10f6 | 0
2f960dfc-b67a-26be-d1b3-9b105535e0a8 | ec3e1058-8840-c9f2-3b25-2488f8b3a8af | 1
c71b28a3-5299-7f4d-f27a-7ad8aeadafe0 | 72d25703-4735-310b-2e06-ff76af1e45ed | 0
3b0a5021-a52b-9ba0-1439-d5aafcf348e7 | d81bb78a-d984-e957-034d-87434acb4e97 | 1
96c36bb7-c4f4-2787-ada8-4aadc17d1123 | c171fe85-33e2-6481-0791-2922267e8777 | 1
95d0f85f-71da-bb9a-2d80-fe27f7c02fe2 | 226f964c-028d-d6de-bf6c-688d2908c5ae | 1
132aa774-42e5-3d3f-498b-50b44a89d401 | 44e31f89-d089-8afc-f4b1-ada051c01474 | 1
ff91641a-5802-be02-bece-79bca993fdbc | 33d8294a-053d-6ab4-94d4-890b47fcf70d | 1
f3196e15-5b61-e92d-e717-f00ed93fe8ae | 62fa4566-5ca2-4a36-f872-4d00f7abadcf | 1

---

Example

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> Row = namedtuple('Row',['first','second','third'])
>>> data = Row(1,2,3)
>>> data
Row(first=1, second=2, third=3)
>>> pprinttable([data])
 first = 1
second = 2
 third = 3
>>> pprinttable([data,data])
first | second | third
------+--------+------
    1 |      2 |     3
    1 |      2 |     3