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Tutorial
PrettyTable is best explained by example. It is designed to let you write something nice and simple like this:
x = PrettyTable(["City name", "Area", "Population", "Annual Rainfall"])
x.set_field_align("City name", "l") # Left align city names
x.set_padding_width(1) # One space between column edges and contents (default)
x.add_row(["Adelaide",1295, 1158259, 600.5])
x.add_row(["Brisbane",5905, 1857594, 1146.4])
x.add_row(["Darwin", 112, 120900, 1714.7])
x.add_row(["Hobart", 1357, 205556, 619.5])
x.add_row(["Sydney", 2058, 4336374, 1214.8])
x.add_row(["Melbourne", 1566, 3806092, 646.9])
x.add_row(["Perth", 5386, 1554769, 869.4])
print x
in order to get something that looks like this:
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| City name | Area | Population | Annual Rainfall |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| Adelaide | 1295 | 1158259 | 600.5 |
| Brisbane | 5905 | 1857594 | 1146.4 |
| Darwin | 112 | 120900 | 1714.7 |
| Hobart | 1357 | 205556 | 619.5 |
| Sydney | 2058 | 4336374 | 1214.8 |
| Melbourne | 1566 | 3806092 | 646.9 |
| Perth | 5386 | 1554769 | 869.4 |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
PrettyTable makes it easy to display data in a nice and neat but non-graphical format that you can use in command line programs, automatically generated emails, etc.
You can use x.add_row to build a table up row-by-row, like in the example above.
You can also use x.add_column to build the table up column-by-column instead of row-by-row, if you're so inclined:
x = PrettyTable()
x.add_column("City name",["Adelaide","Brisbane","Darwin","Hobart","Sydney","Melbourne","Perth"])
x.add_column("Area", [1295, 5905, 112, 1357, 2058, 1566, 5386])
x.add_column("Population", [1158259, 1857594, 120900, 205556, 4336374, 3806092, 1554769])
x.add_column("Annual Rainfall",[600.5, 1146.4, 1714.7, 619.5, 1214.8, 646.9, 869.4])
You can even build a table using a combination of add_row and add_column if you're careful. It's probably not a good idea, but PrettyTable will work as long as you do it properly.
Once you've put data into a table, you can print the whole thing out using either print x on Python 2.x or print(x) on Python 3.x.
If you don't want to print a table but just get a string which you can, e.g., write to a file, you can use: string = x.get_string() The get_string method also takes a lot of arguments you can use to change the appearance of your table. If you want to take advantage of these abilities when printing a table, you can just print the returned string:
print x.get_string()
on Python 2.x or print(x.get_string()) on Python 3.x.
If you're only interested in showing some of the fields in your table, you can do this:
print x.get_string(fields=["City name", "Population"])
(or use print() for Python 3.x) and get this:
+-----------+------------+
| City name | Population |
+-----------+------------+
| Adelaide | 1158259 |
| Brisbane | 1857594 |
| Darwin | 120900 |
| Hobart | 205556 |
| Sydney | 4336374 |
| Melbourne | 3806092 |
| Perth | 1554769 |
+-----------+------------+
You can print only the first 3 rows of the table by doing this:
print x.get_string(start=0,end=3)
which gives you this:
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| City name | Area | Population | Annual Rainfall |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| Adelaide | 1295 | 1158259 | 600.5 |
| Brisbane | 5905 | 1857594 | 1146.4 |
| Darwin | 112 | 120900 | 1714.7 |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
You can sort the rows of your table by a particular column like this:
print x.get_string(sortby="Annual Rainfall")
which gives you this:
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| City name | Area | Population | Annual Rainfall |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
| Adelaide | 1295 | 1158259 | 600.5 |
| Hobart | 1357 | 205556 | 619.5 |
| Melbourne | 1566 | 3806092 | 646.9 |
| Perth | 5386 | 1554769 | 869.4 |
| Brisbane | 5905 | 1857594 | 1146.4 |
| Sydney | 2058 | 4336374 | 1214.8 |
| Darwin | 112 | 120900 | 1714.7 |
+-----------+------+------------+-----------------+
You can do
print x.get_string(sortby="Annual Rainfall", reversesort=True)
to sort the table in the reverse order (from most to least rainful).
If you are going to print the table several times and you always want to sort by a certain column, you can do
x.sortby = "Annual Rainfall"
print x
print x
print x
and the sorting will happen each time. You can turn sorting off later with
x.sortby = None
Similarly, you can set reversesort to be permanently True or False in the same way.
PrettyTable supports lots of formatting options to control the appearance of your table.
Instead of an ASCII table, you can call get_html_string to get a HTML <table> structure. get_html_string() supports most of the same arguments as get_string, so you can select only some rows or columns, do sorting, etc.
You can use the "attribute" argument to pass a dictionary of HTML attributes that should appear in the opening <table> tag, e.g. if you want to get "<table class="foo">", so that you can use CSS to style your table, then use:
x.get_string(attributes = {"class": "foo"})