python - Pandas to_html() truncates string contents

83
votes

I have a Python Pandas DataFrame object containing textual data. My problem is, that when I use to_html() function, it truncates the strings in the output.

For example:

import pandas
df = pandas.DataFrame({'text': ['Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.']})
print (df.to_html())

The output is truncated at adapis...

<table border="1" class="dataframe">
  <thead>
    <tr style="text-align: right;">
      <th></th>
      <th>text</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th>0</th>
      <td> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipis...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

There is a related question on SO, but it uses placeholders and search/replace functionality to postprocess the HTML, which I would like to avoid:

Is there a simpler solution to this problem? I could not find anything related from the documentation.

2
pythonhtmlpandas
How are you viewing the contents, is it through iPython? try this pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', -1) and then print the html, you should find that it displays the full text, this is nothing to do with truncation of the actual data just a display setting - EdChum
@EdChum Yes, indeed I was looking at the HTML trough IPython, but also got same results in ordinary python terminal. But yes, set_option fixes that! In both the terminal and IPython. Did not know about that possibility before. - Timo
pandas tries to protect you from display reams of output that might kill lesser python environments, apart from obscure bugs I've not heard of it ever truncating the data - EdChum
There is a list of them here: stackoverflow.com/questions/21293536/list-of-pandas-options/… and the online docs: pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/options.html - EdChum

2 Answers

111
votes

What you are seeing is pandas truncating the output for display purposes only.

The default max_colwidth value is 50 which is what you are seeing.

You can set this value to whatever you desire or you can set it to -1 which effectively turns this off:

pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', -1)

Although I would advise against this, it would be better to set it to something that can be displayed easily in your console or ipython.

A list of the options can be found here: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/options.html

19
votes

it seems that pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', -1) is indeed the only option. To prevent irreversible global changes of how dataframes are presented in the console, you may save the previous setting in a variable and restore it immediately after the usage, as follows:

    old_width = pd.get_option('display.max_colwidth')
    pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', -1)
    open('some_file.html', 'w').write(some_data.to_html())
    pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', old_width)