How to preview a part of a large pandas DataFrame, in iPython notebook?

Question

I am just getting started with pandas in the IPython Notebook and encountering the following problem: When a DataFrame read from a CSV file is small, the IPython Notebook displays it in a nice table view. When the DataFrame is large, something like this is ouput:

In [27]:  evaluation = readCSV("evaluation_MO_without_VNS_quality.csv").filter(["solver", "instance", "runtime", "objective"])  In [37]:  evaluation  Out[37]:  <class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'> Int64Index: 333 entries, 0 to 332 Data columns: solver       333  non-null values instance     333  non-null values runtime      333  non-null values objective    333  non-null values dtypes: int64(1), object(3) 

I would like to see a small portion of the data frame as a table just to make sure it is in the right format. What options do I have?

Answer 1

df.head(5) # will print out the first 5 rows df.tail(5) # will print out the 5 last rows