Making a string out of pandas DataFrame

Question

I have pandas DataFrame which looks like this:

 Name  Number    Description
 car   5         red

And I need to make a string out of it which looks like this:

"""Name: car

Number: 5 

Description: red"""

I'm a beginner and I really don't get how do I do it? I'll probably need to apply this to some similar DataFrames later.

What should be displayed if you have several entries in your dataframe? — cglacet, Apr 06 '19 at 23:09
Then I have to somehow print that info for only one row. For example I have rows "car1", "car2", "car3". If user types "car1" I need to print car1 line — primadonna, Apr 10 '19 at 19:50

cglacet · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-06T23:50:05.807

2

You can use iterrows to iterate over you dataframe rows, on each row you can then get the columns and print the result the way you want. For example:

import pandas as pd

dtf = pd.DataFrame({
    "Name": ["car", "other"],
    "Number": [5, 6],
    "Description": ["red", "green"]
})

def stringify_dataframe(dtf):
    text = ""
    for i, row in dtf.iterrows():
        for col in dtf.columns.values:
            text += f"{col}: {row[col]}\n"
        text += "\n"
    return text

s = stringify_dataframe(dtf)

Now s contains the following:

>>> print(s)
Name: car
Number: 5
Description: red

Name: other
Number: 6
Description: green

edited Apr 06 '19 at 23:50

answered Apr 06 '19 at 23:24

cglacet

8,873
4
45
60

Thanks a lot! But can I somehow put it in a string, so I can just use it as variable in different needs – primadonna Apr 06 '19 at 23:46
Yes sure, I'll update my answer (do you need one string per entry or one big string?) – cglacet Apr 06 '19 at 23:46
I need one big string – primadonna Apr 06 '19 at 23:48

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 07 '19 at 06:45

1

Iterating over a Dataframe is faster when using apply.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({
    "Name": ["car", "other"],
    "Number": [5, 6],
    "Description": ["red", "green"]
})

s = '\n'.join(
        df.apply(
            lambda row: 
            '\n'.join(f'{head}: {val}' for head, val in row.iteritems()),
            axis=1))

Of course, for this small data set a for loop is faster, but on my machine a data set with 10 rows was already processed faster.

answered Apr 07 '19 at 06:45

Zapperdulchen

31
2

```for i in range (len (dtf)): print(f'{dtf.loc[i]}\n')``` or ```for row in dtf.to_string(index = False).split('\n'): print(row)``` may also be used but not what author has asked. – Subham Mar 18 '21 at 03:33

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 18 '21 at 04:07

Another approach,

import pandas as pd

dtf = pd.DataFrame({
    "Name": ["car", "other"],
    "Number": [5, 6],
    "Description": ["red", "green"]
})


for row_index in range(len(dtf)):
    for col in dtf.columns:
        print(f"{col}: {dtf.loc[row_index, col]}")

Name: car
Number: 5
Description: red
Name: other
Number: 6
Description: green

[Program finished]

Making a string out of pandas DataFrame

3 Answers3