Use python tabulate module to create tables

If you want to create some tables from a python list, you can use the tabulate module, it can generate the table easily in text mode and in many formats, than you can past it into markdown, wiki files or add the print version to your python CLI in order to give a beautiful output to the CLI users.

Install python tabulate module

> pip install tabulate

How to use tabulate

The official doc has already included nearly everything.

How to print in markdown, rst, wiki, html formats

For rst, wiki, html formats, the official doc has already clearly given it, but for markdown, it’s not mentioned. After the test, the "pipe" format from PHP Markdown Extra is compatible to markdown.

file	tabulate format (tablefmt)
rst	“rst”
markdown	“pipe”
mediawiki	“mediawiki”
html	“html”

Update 2019-04-23: When I tested the lastest tabulate version 0.8.3, it added support also github format.

Html code can be injected into Markdown file.

Visualize all the formats

from tabulate import _table_formats, tabulate


format_list = list(_table_formats.keys())
# current format list in tabulate version 0.8.3:
# ['simple', 'plain', 'grid', 'fancy_grid', 'github', 'pipe', 'orgtbl', 'jira', 'presto', 'psql', 'rst', 'mediawiki', 'moinmoin', 'youtrack', 'html', 'latex', 'latex_raw', 'latex_booktabs', 'tsv', 'textile']


# Each element in the table list is a row in the generated table
table = [["spam",42], ["eggs", 451], ["bacon", 0]]
headers = ["item", "qty"]

for f in format_list:
    print("\nformat: {}\n".format(f))
    print(tabulate(table, headers, tablefmt=f))