Reading tab-delimited data without header in pandas

Question

I'm having trouble using pandas to open tab-delimited data without headers.

My test data (actually contains 200 rows, of which I am showing the first 10):

 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10006 0 36M 36 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10012 0 36M 36 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10018 0 36M 36 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10024 0 36M 36 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10030 0 36M 36 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10036 0 36M 36 Tag19184 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10042 0 36M 36 Tag20198 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10048 0 36M 36 Tag20198 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10054 0 36M 36 Tag45093 CTAAC hffef 1 a 36 - chr1 10060 0 36M 36 

My code is:

 import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv('in_test.txt',sep='\t',header=None) print df 

However, I get the following output, which I think I can’t use for further data processing (?):

 <class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'> Int64Index: 200 entries, 0 to 199 Data columns: X.1 200 non-null values X.2 200 non-null values X.3 200 non-null values X.4 200 non-null values X.5 200 non-null values X.6 200 non-null values X.7 200 non-null values X.8 200 non-null values X.9 200 non-null values X.10 200 non-null values X.11 200 non-null values X.12 200 non-null values dtypes: int64(5), object(7) 

here suggests that print df should just provide me with the appropriate data frame. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I think you are reading this correctly, but:

• See: change pandas 0.13.0 "print dataframe" to print data, as in earlier versions , this is what pandas does in older versions. Thus, the update will solve it.
• You can use ipython notebook where DataFrames will be displayed as HTML tables.
• You can use df.head(5) (similar to r head ) to get the first few rows to make sure your DataFrame correct.