Recreate pandas dataframe from question in stackoverflow

Question

This is a question from someone who tries to answer questions about pandas dataframes. Consider a question with a given dataset which is just the visualization (not the actual code), for example:

   numbers letters       dates         all
0        1       a  20-10-2020         NaN
1        2       b  21-10-2020           b
2        3       c  20-11-2020           4
3        4       d  20-10-2021  20-10-2020
4        5       e  10-10-2020        3.14

Is it possible to quickly import this in python as a dataframe or as a dictionary? So far I copied the given text and transformed it to a dataframe by making strings (adding '') and so on.

I think there are two 'solutions' for this:

1. Make a function that given the text as input, it somehow transforms it to a dataframe.
2. Use some function in the text-editor (I use spyder) which can do this trick for us.

Answer 1

read_clipboard

You can use pd.read_clipboard() optionally with a separator (e.g. pd.read_clipboard('\s\s+') if you have datetime strings or spaces in column names and columns are separated by at least two spaces):

• select text on the question and copy to clipboard (ctrl+c/command-c)
• move to python shell or notebook and run pd.read_clipboard()

Note that this doesn't work well on all platforms.

read_csv + io.StringIO

For more complex formats, combine read_csv combined with io.StringIO:

data = '''
   numbers letters       dates         all
0        1       a  20-10-2020         NaN
1        2       b  21-10-2020           b
2        3       c  20-11-2020           4
3        4       d  20-10-2021  20-10-2020
4        5       e  10-10-2020        3.14
'''

import io

df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(data), sep='\s+')
df