How to return a string from pandas.DataFrame.info()

Question

I would like to display the output from pandas.DataFrame.info() on a tkinter text widget so I need a string. However pandas.DataFrame.info() returns NoneType is there anyway I can change this?

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

data = np.random.rand(10).reshape(5,2)
cols = 'a', 'b'
df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns=cols)
df_info = df.info()
print(df_info)
type(df_info)

I'd like to do something like:

info_str = ""
df_info = df.info(buf=info_str)

Is it possible to get pandas to return a string object from DataFrame.info()?

Answer 1

In the documentation you linked, there's a buf argument:

buf : writable buffer, defaults to sys.stdout

So one option would be to pass a StringIO instance:

>>> import io
>>> buf = io.StringIO()
>>> df.info(buf=buf)
>>> s = buf.getvalue()
>>> type(s)
<class 'str'>
>>> print(s)
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 5 entries, 0 to 4
Data columns (total 2 columns):
a    5 non-null float64
b    5 non-null float64
dtypes: float64(2)
memory usage: 160.0 bytes