How to copy/paste DataFrame from Stack Overflow into Python

Question

In questions and answers, users very often post an example DataFrame which their question/answer works with:

In []: x
Out[]: 
   bar  foo
0    4         


        

Answer 1

pd.read_clipboard() is nifty. However, if you're writing code in a script or a notebook (and you want your code to work in the future) it's not a great fit. Here's an alternative way to copy/paste the output of a dataframe into a new dataframe object that ensures that df will outlive the contents of your clipboard:

# py3 only, see below for py2
import pandas as pd
from io import StringIO

d = '''0   1   2   3   4
A   Y   N   N   Y
B   N   Y   N   N
C   N   N   N   N
D   Y   Y   N   Y
E   N   Y   Y   Y
F   Y   Y   N   Y
G   Y   N   N   Y'''

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

A few notes:

• The triple-quoted string preserves the newlines in the output.
• StringIO wraps the output in a file-like object, which read_csv requires.
• Setting sep to \s+ makes it so that each contiguous block of whitespace is treated as a single delimiter.

update

The above answer is Python 3 only. If you're stuck in Python 2, replace the import line:

from io import StringIO

with instead:

from StringIO import StringIO

If you have an old version of pandas (v0.24 or older) there's an easy way to write a Py2/Py3 compatible version of the above code:

import pandas as pd

d = ...
df = pd.read_csv(pd.compat.StringIO(d), sep='\s+')

The newest versions of pandas have dropped the compat module along with Python 2 support.