pd.read_html() imports a list rather than a dataframe

Question

I used pd.read_html() to import a table from a webpage but instead of structuring the data as a dataframe Python imported it as a list. How can I import the data as a dataframe? Thank you!

The code is the following:

import pandas as pd

import html5lib

url = 'http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html'

dfs = pd.read_html(url)

type(dfs)

Out[1]: list

Answer 1

.read_html() produces a list of dataframes (there could be multiple tables in an HTML source), get the desired one by index. In your case, there is a single dataframe:

dfs = pd.read_html(url)
df = dfs[0]
print(df)

Note that, if there are no tables in the HTML source, it would return an error and would never produce an empty list.

Answer 2

import pandas as pd
import html5lib
url = 'http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html'
dfs = pd.read_html(url)
df = pd.concat(dfs)
df