Post a pandas dataframe from Jupyter Notebooks into a Stack Overflow problem

Question

What are the steps to post a Pandas dataframe in a Stack Overflow question?

I found: How to make good reproducible pandas examples.
I followed the instructions and used pd.read_clipboard, but I still had to spend a significant amount of time formatting the table to make it look correct.

I also found: How to display a pandas dataframe on a Stack Overflow question body.

I tried to copy the dataframe from Jupyter and paste it into a Blockquote. As mentioned, I also ran pd.read_clipboard('\s\s+') in Jupyter to copy it to the clipboard and then pasted it into a Blockquote.
I also tried creating a table and pasting the values in the table.
All of these methods required that I tweak the formatting to make it look properly formatted.

An example dataframe:

df = pd.DataFrame(
    [['Captain', 'Crunch', 72],
     ['Trix', 'Rabbit', 36],
     ['Count', 'Chocula', 41],
     ['Tony', 'Tiger',  54],
     ['Buzz', 'Bee', 28],
     ['Toucan', 'Sam', 38]],
    columns=['first_name', 'last_name', 'age'])

Answer 1

.to_markdown()

The easiest method I found was to use print(df.to_markdown()).

This will convert the data into mkd format which can be interpreted by SO. For example with your dataframe, the output is:

	first_name	last_name	age
0	Captain	Crunch	72
1	Trix	36	Rabbit
2	Count	Chocula	41
3	Tony	54	Tiger
4	Buzz	28	Bee
5	Toucan	Sam	38

Note you might need to install tabulate module.

.to_dict()

Another option is to use df.head().to_dict('list'), but it might not be the best one for large datasets (will work for minimum reproducible examples though)

{'first_name': ['Captain', 'Trix', 'Count', 'Tony', 'Buzz'], 'last_name': ['Crunch', 36, 'Chocula', 54, 28], 'age': [72, 'Rabbit', 41, 'Tiger', 'Bee']}

Anyone can use this by passing it through pd.DataFrame()

Note: I'm using 'list' because the index is not significant in the given data. There are other options for other data layouts.

Answer 2

Here is how I would share your data example in a post for SO, leaving out the comments I included for assistance here:

#paste the contents of the comma-separated file between two sets of triple ticks
s='''
first_name,last_name,age
Captain,Crunch,72
Trix,36,Rabbit
Count,Chocula,41
Tony,54,Tiger
Buzz,28,Bee
Toucan,Sam,38
'''
#then include in the post the code to make the df instead of 
# assuming people know to use use the table and use read_table
# because this catches any issues, too, because displaying `df` should give starting point
import io
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(s))

(See another example here.)

The nice thing is it lets you draft that by hand or customize it some in a text editor if you want.

---

Preparation behind-the-scenes

If it was already a dataframe there is no reason to fuss with formatting a table. Let Pandas make it.

To make that I took your dataframe code and did this:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([['Captain', 'Crunch', 72],
               ['Trix', 36, 'Rabbit'],
               ['Count', 'Chocula', 41],
               ['Tony', 54, 'Tiger'],
               ['Buzz', 28, 'Bee'],
               ['Toucan', 'Sam', 38]],
              columns=['first_name', 'last_name', 'age'])
df.to_csv("df_as_csv.csv", index = False)

Then I pasted the content in the .csv into the s string content in the block above.

---

I prefer .tsv and found it more human readable; however @wjandrea as pointed out Stack Overflow converts tabs to spaces when rendering posts, so that doesn't work well. Fortunately, comma de-limited can be easily edited and customized by hand to some extent. (And if you really prefer .tsv like me, you can encode it in SO and it will work in Python using \t to function as tabs, like so s='''first_name\tlast_name\tage''' for first line example. You can use Python to do the replacement if you want and it remains hand-editable this way. Curiously, in my hands I cannot find a way to write out with %%writefile` cell magic and get the tabs respected.)