How do I output lists as a table in Jupyter notebook?

Question

I know that I've seen some example somewhere before but for the life of me I cannot find it when googling around.

I have some rows of data:

data = [[1,2,3],
        [4,5,6],
        [7,8,9],
        ]

And I want to output this data in a table, e.g.

+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
| 7 | 8 | 9 |
+---+---+---+

Obviously I could use a library like prettytable or download pandas or something but I'm very disinterested in doing that.

I just want to output my rows as tables in my Jupyter notebook cell. How do I do this?

Answer 1

There is a nice trick: wrap the data with pandas DataFrame.

import pandas as pd
data = [[1, 2], [3, 4]]
pd.DataFrame(data, columns=["Foo", "Bar"])

It displays data like:

  | Foo | Bar |
0 | 1   | 2   |
1 | 3   | 4   |

Answer 2

I just discovered that tabulate has a HTML option and is rather simple to use.

Update: As of Jupyter v6 and later, the returned table should just render via the output cell:

import tabulate
data = [["Sun",696000,1989100000],
         ["Earth",6371,5973.6],
         ["Moon",1737,73.5],
         ["Mars",3390,641.85]]
table = tabulate.tabulate(data, tablefmt='html')
table

As for Jupyter v5 or earlier, you may need to be more explicit, similar to Werner's answer:

from IPython.display import HTML, display
display(HTML(table))

Still looking for something simple to use to create more complex table layouts like with latex syntax and formatting to merge cells and do variable substitution in a notebook:
Allow references to Python variables in Markdown cells #2958

Answer 3

I finally re-found the jupyter/IPython documentation that I was looking for.

I needed this:

from IPython.display import HTML, display

data = [[1,2,3],
        [4,5,6],
        [7,8,9],
        ]

display(HTML(
   '<table><tr>{}</tr></table>'.format(
       '</tr><tr>'.join(
           '<td>{}</td>'.format('</td><td>'.join(str(_) for _ in row)) for row in data)
       )
))

(I may have slightly mucked up the comprehensions, but display(HTML('some html here')) is what we needed)

Answer 4

tabletext fit this well

import tabletext

data = [[1,2,30],
        [4,23125,6],
        [7,8,999],
        ]

print tabletext.to_text(data)

result:

┌───┬───────┬─────┐
│ 1 │     2 │  30 │
├───┼───────┼─────┤
│ 4 │ 23125 │   6 │
├───┼───────┼─────┤
│ 7 │     8 │ 999 │
└───┴───────┴─────┘