Using PrettyTable in Python to Display Tabular Data in the Command Line

When building a Python command‑line tool for managing cloud resources, displaying information as a readable table greatly improves usability; the PrettyTable library provides a simple way to generate such tables with good Unicode support.

pip install prettytable installs the library, after which you can import it with from prettytable import PrettyTable and create a table by specifying column headers, e.g., table = PrettyTable(["编号", "云编号", "名称", "IP地址"]) .

Rows can be added using table.add_row([...]) , where each list must match the number of headers; this method is demonstrated with a sample script that adds several server entries and prints the table with print(table) .

Columns can be added with table.add_column("项目", ["编号", "云编号", "名称", "IP地址"]) , allowing you to build a table without predefined headers.

Data can be imported directly from a CSV file using from_csv after opening the file, e.g., fp = open("res.csv", "r") table = from_csv(fp) , which reads the CSV and prints the resulting table.

Database query results can be turned into a table with from_db_cursor ; the article shows an example using SQLite: conn = sqlite3.connect("/tmp/aliyun.db") cur = conn.cursor() cur.execute("SELECT * FROM res") table = from_db_cursor(cur) .

HTML tables can also be parsed using from_html . The function returns a list containing a PrettyTable object, so you must print the first element, e.g., print(table[0]) , to avoid the list representation error.

PrettyTable supports multiple output formats: the default print(table) renders an ASCII table, while print(table.get_html_string()) returns an HTML‑formatted table.

You can selectively output data by specifying columns ( table.get_string(fields=["编号", "IP地址"]) ), rows ( table.get_string(start=0, end=2) ), or by slicing the table ( new_table = table[0:2] ). Sorting is available with table.get_string(sortby="编号", reversesort=True) .

Styling options include built‑in styles such as MSWORD_FRIENDLY , PLAIN_COLUMNS , DEFAULT , and RANDOM . Custom styles can be set by adjusting alignment ( table.align[1] = "l" ) and border characters ( table.border = True , table.junction_char = "$" , table.horizontal_char = "+" , table.vertical_char = "%" ), then printing the table.