Post a pandas dataframe from Jupyter Notebooks into a Stack Overflow problem

Here is how I would share your data example in a post for SO, leaving out the comments I included for assistance here:

#paste the contents of the comma-separated file between two sets of triple ticks
s='''
first_name,last_name,age
Captain,Crunch,72
Trix,36,Rabbit
Count,Chocula,41
Tony,54,Tiger
Buzz,28,Bee
Toucan,Sam,38
'''
#then include in the post the code to make the df instead of 
# assuming people know to use use the table and use read_table
# because this catches any issues, too, because displaying `df` should give starting point
import io
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(s))

(See another example here.)

The nice thing is it lets you draft that by hand or customize it some in a text editor if you want.

Preparation behind-the-scenes

If it was already a dataframe there is no reason to fuss with formatting a table. Let Pandas make it.

To make that I took your dataframe code and did this:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([['Captain', 'Crunch', 72],
               ['Trix', 36, 'Rabbit'],
               ['Count', 'Chocula', 41],
               ['Tony', 54, 'Tiger'],
               ['Buzz', 28, 'Bee'],
               ['Toucan', 'Sam', 38]],
              columns=['first_name', 'last_name', 'age'])
df.to_csv("df_as_csv.csv", index = False)

Then I pasted the content in the .csv into the s string content in the block above.

I prefer .tsv and found it more human readable; however @wjandrea as pointed out Stack Overflow converts tabs to spaces when rendering posts, so that doesn't work well. Fortunately, comma de-limited can be easily edited and customized by hand to some extent. (And if you really prefer .tsv like me, you can encode it in SO and it will work in Python using \t to function as tabs, like so s='''first_name\tlast_name\tage''' for first line example. You can use Python to do the replacement if you want and it remains hand-editable this way. Curiously, in my hands I cannot find a way to write out with %%writefile` cell magic and get the tabs respected.)

to_dict('tight')

The most reproducible option is to_dict('tight'), this handles data, indexes names, indexes with multiple levels:

data = df.to_dict('tight')
print(data) # this is the output to provide in the question

Then to load the data (here with a more complex example):

data = {
 'index': [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
 'columns': [('level_0', 'first_name'),
  ('level_0', 'last_name'),
  ('level_0', 'age')],
 'data': [['Captain', 'Crunch', 72],
  ['Trix', 'Rabbit', 36],
  ['Count', 'Chocula', 41],
  ['Tony', 'Tiger', 54],
  ['Buzz', 'Bee', 28],
  ['Toucan', 'Sam', 38]],
 'index_names': ['index'],
 'column_names': [None, None]}

df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(data, orient='tight')

Output:

         level_0              
      first_name last_name age
index                         
0        Captain    Crunch  72
1           Trix    Rabbit  36
2          Count   Chocula  41
3           Tony     Tiger  54
4           Buzz       Bee  28
5         Toucan       Sam  38

to_clipboard(False)

For small datasets, I like:

df.to_clipboard(False)

Which directly copies a nice padded table:

  first_name last_name  age
0    Captain    Crunch   72
1       Trix    Rabbit   36
2      Count   Chocula   41
3       Tony     Tiger   54
4       Buzz       Bee   28
5     Toucan       Sam   38

This can be read, after copying the block of text, with:

df = pd.from_clipboard()

The poor man's version is:

print(df.to_string())

to_csv()

Another interesting option is to provide the data as CSV. By providing no file name, the CSV output is returned as string:

print(df.to_csv(index=False))

first_name,last_name,age
Captain,Crunch,72
Trix,Rabbit,36
Count,Chocula,41
Tony,Tiger,54
Buzz,Bee,28
Toucan,Sam,38

Then reading with:

import io

df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO('''first_name,last_name,age
Captain,Crunch,72
Trix,Rabbit,36
Count,Chocula,41
Tony,Tiger,54
Buzz,Bee,28
Toucan,Sam,38'''))