Creating TextTables and PrettyTables using Python

There are some light and useful python packages for this purpose:

1. tabulate: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tabulate

>>> from tabulate import tabulate
>>> print tabulate([['Alice', 24], ['Bob', 19]], headers=['Name', 'Age'])
Name      Age
------  -----
Alice      24
Bob        19

tabulate has many options to specify headers and table format.

>>> print tabulate([['Alice', 24], ['Bob', 19]], headers=['Name', 'Age'], tablefmt='orgtbl')
| Name   |   Age |
|--------+-------|
| Alice  |    24 |
| Bob    |    19 |

2. PrettyTable: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PrettyTable

>>> from prettytable import PrettyTable
>>> t = PrettyTable(['Name', 'Age'])
>>> t.add_row(['Alice', 24])
>>> t.add_row(['Bob', 19])
>>> print t
+-------+-----+
|  Name | Age |
+-------+-----+
| Alice |  24 |
|  Bob  |  19 |
+-------+-----+

PrettyTable has options to read data from csv, html, sql database. Also you are able to select subset of data, sort table and change table styles.

3. texttable: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/texttable

>>> from texttable import Texttable
>>> t = Texttable()
>>> t.add_rows([['Name', 'Age'], ['Alice', 24], ['Bob', 19]])
>>> print t.draw()
+-------+-----+
| Name  | Age |
+=======+=====+
| Alice | 24  |
+-------+-----+
| Bob   | 19  |
+-------+-----+

with texttable you can control horisontal/verical align, border style and data types.

Other options:

• terminaltables Easily draw tables in terminal/console applications from a list of lists of strings. Supports multi-line rows.
• asciitable Asciitable can read and write a wide range of ASCII table formats via built-in Extension Reader Classes.

References: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9535954/python-printing-lists-as-tabular-data

Make sure to install packages using pip.