pandas display: truncate column display rather than wrapping

Question

With lengthy column names, DataFrames will display in a very messy form seemingly no matter what options are set.

Info: I\'m in Jupyter QtConsole, pandas 0.20.1, wit

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, Pandas itself seems to be bugged or badly designed here, so a workaround is required.

Most of the time this problem occurs with numerical columns, since numbers are relatively short. Pandas will split the column heading onto multiple lines if there are spaces in it, so you can "hack in" the correct behavior by inserting spaces into column headings for numerical columns when you display the dataframe. I have a one-liner to do this:

def colfix(df, L=5): return df.rename(columns=lambda x: ' '.join(x.replace('_', ' ')[i:i+L] for i in range(0,len(x),L)) if df[x].dtype in ['float64','int64'] else x )

do display your dataframe, simply type

colfix(your_df)

note that the renaming is not going to permanently change the dataframe, it will only add spaces to the names for the purposes of displaying it that one time.

Results (in a Jupyter Notebook):

With colfix:

Without: