Using PrettyTable in Python to Create Formatted Command‑Line Tables

When building command‑line tools on Linux, displaying structured data as readable tables greatly improves usability; the PrettyTable library provides this capability with excellent Unicode support.

Installation

PrettyTable is not part of the Python standard library and can be installed via pip install prettytable .

Basic Example

#!/usr/bin/python
#**coding:utf-8**
import sys
from prettytable import PrettyTable
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

table = PrettyTable(['编号','云编号','名称','IP地址'])
table.add_row(['1','server01','服务器01','172.16.0.1'])
table.add_row(['2','server02','服务器02','172.16.0.2'])
# ... additional rows omitted for brevity ...
print(table)

The script prints a neatly bordered table with Chinese column headers and data.

Adding Data

Data can be added row‑wise with table.add_row([...]) or column‑wise with table.add_column('列名', [...]) . The length of the data list must match the number of columns.

Importing from CSV

#!/usr/bin/python
#**coding:utf-8**
import sys
from prettytable import PrettyTable, from_csv
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

table = PrettyTable()
fp = open('res.csv', 'r')
table = from_csv(fp)
print(table)
fp.close()

Use from_csv after opening a CSV file to populate the table automatically.

Importing from a Database Cursor

#!/usr/bin/python
#**coding:utf-8**
import sys, sqlite3
from prettytable import PrettyTable, from_db_cursor
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

conn = sqlite3.connect('/tmp/aliyun.db')
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute('SELECT * FROM res')
table = from_db_cursor(cur)
print(table)

Query results from SQLite (or MySQL) can be turned into a PrettyTable directly.

Importing from HTML

#!/usr/bin/python
#**coding:utf-8**
import sys
from prettytable import PrettyTable, from_html
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

html_string = '''
...
'''

table = from_html(html_string)
print(table[0])

The function returns a list containing a PrettyTable object; therefore the first element must be printed.

Output Formats

Standard printing ( print(table) ) shows a bordered ASCII table. For HTML output, use print(table.get_html_string()) .

Selective Output

Specific columns can be displayed with print(table.get_string(fields=["编号","IP地址"])) , and row ranges with print(table.get_string(start=0, end=2)) . Slicing syntax ( new_table = table[0:2] ) also works.

Sorting

Sort the table by a column using print(table.get_string(sortby="编号", reversesort=True)) .

Styling

Built‑in styles include MSWORD_FRIENDLY , PLAIN_COLUMNS , DEFAULT , and RANDOM . Set a style with table.set_style(DEFAULT) .

Custom Style

Attributes such as table.align[1] = 'l' , table.border , table.junction_char , table.horizontal_char , and table.vertical_char allow fine‑grained control over alignment and border characters.

#!/usr/bin/python
#**coding:utf-8**
import sys
from prettytable import PrettyTable, MSWORD_FRIENDLY, PLAIN_COLUMNS, RANDOM, DEFAULT
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

table = PrettyTable(['编号','云编号','名称','IP地址'])
# ... add rows ...

table.align[1] = 'l'

table.border = True

table.junction_char = '$'

table.horizontal_char = '+'

table.vertical_char = '%'

print(table)

These settings produce a table with custom border characters and left‑aligned second column.

For more details, refer to the official repository: https://github.com/jazzband/prettytable .