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

Use max_columns

from string import ascii_letters

df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(10, size=(5, 52)), columns=list(ascii_letters))

with pd.option_context(
    'display.max_colwidth', 20,
    'expand_frame_repr', False,
    'display.max_rows', 25,
    'display.max_columns', 5,
):
    print(df.add_prefix('really_long_column_name_'))

   really_long_column_name_a  really_long_column_name_b            ...              really_long_column_name_Y  really_long_column_name_Z
0                    8                          1                  ...                                1                          9      
1                    8                          5                  ...                                2                          1      
2                    5                          0                  ...                                9                          9      
3                    6                          8                  ...                                0                          9      
4                    1                          2                  ...                                7                          1      

[5 rows x 52 columns]

---

Another idea... Obviously not exactly what you want, but maybe you can twist it to your needs.

d1 = df.add_suffix('_really_long_column_name')

with pd.option_context('display.max_colwidth', 4, 'expand_frame_repr', False):
    mw = pd.get_option('display.max_colwidth')
    print(d1.rename(columns=lambda x: x[:mw-3] + '...' if len(x) > mw else x))

   a...  b...  c...  d...  e...  f...  g...  h...  i...  j...  ...   Q...  R...  S...  T...  U...  V...  W...  X...  Y...  Z...
0    6     5     5     5     8     3     5     0     7     6   ...     9     0     6     9     6     8     4     0     6     7 
1    0     5     4     7     2     5     4     3     8     7   ...     8     1     5     3     5     9     4     5     5     3 
2    7     2     1     6     5     1     0     1     3     1   ...     6     7     0     9     9     5     2     8     2     2 
3    1     8     7     1     4     5     5     8     8     3   ...     3     6     5     7     1     0     8     1     4     0 
4    7     5     6     2     4     9     7     9     0     5   ...     6     8     1     6     3     5     4     2     3     2