I am creating an application that requires analysis of tabular data.
I would like to perform some columnar operations, such as the ability to rename columns, delete columns, and calculate a new column based on the values of existing columns.
My first choice would be something like Pandas, however one limitation is that this project should be cross-platform and very easy to deploy to virtualenv. Pandas (on W32) seems to be using binary installers that are not easy to handle.
My second choice would be to flip my own table class, but I hope this does not become necessary.
Are there any alternatives?
UPDATE1 : Anaconda, yes, this is a great package, but I'm not free to choose my own platform. The platform is selected for me: Vanilla CPython 2.7.3 32bit. One of the servers does not have a C ++ compiler. There is a cost to introducing any new dependencies other than python, since I would have to ensure that any developer who uses this has these components, so keeping pure python will be valuable.
UPDATE2 . What can I say from tabular data? Informally, this is the kind of data that you could represent in a spreadsheet or a table in an SQL database.
In this case, they are structured data organized in rows and columns. Each column will have a consistent type, but may be None. Each column will have a row name. The columns are in order.