pandas.read_fwf

pandas.read_fwf(filepath_or_buffer, colspecs='infer', widths=None, **kwds)

Read a table of fixed-width formatted lines into DataFrame

Also supports optionally iterating or breaking of the file into chunks.

Additional help can be found in the online docs for IO Tools.

Parameters:

filepath_or_buffer : str, pathlib.Path, py._path.local.LocalPath or any object with a read() method (such as a file handle or StringIO)

The string could be a URL. Valid URL schemes include http, ftp, s3, and file. For file URLs, a host is expected. For instance, a local file could be file ://localhost/path/to/table.csv

colspecs : list of pairs (int, int) or ‘infer’. optional

A list of pairs (tuples) giving the extents of the fixed-width fields of each line as half-open intervals (i.e., [from, to[ ). String value ‘infer’ can be used to instruct the parser to try detecting the column specifications from the first 100 rows of the data (default=’infer’).

widths : list of ints. optional

A list of field widths which can be used instead of ‘colspecs’ if the intervals are contiguous.

delimiter : str, default None

Alternative argument name for sep.

header : int or list of ints, default ‘infer’

Row number(s) to use as the column names, and the start of the data. Default behavior is as if set to 0 if no names passed, otherwise None. Explicitly pass header=0 to be able to replace existing names. The header can be a list of integers that specify row locations for a multi-index on the columns e.g. [0,1,3]. Intervening rows that are not specified will be skipped (e.g. 2 in this example is skipped). Note that this parameter ignores commented lines and empty lines if skip_blank_lines=True, so header=0 denotes the first line of data rather than the first line of the file.

names : array-like, default None

List of column names to use. If file contains no header row, then you should explicitly pass header=None

index_col : int or sequence or False, default None

Column to use as the row labels of the DataFrame. If a sequence is given, a MultiIndex is used. If you have a malformed file with delimiters at the end of each line, you might consider index_col=False to force pandas to _not_ use the first column as the index (row names)

usecols : array-like, default None

Return a subset of the columns. Results in much faster parsing time and lower memory usage.

squeeze : boolean, default False

If the parsed data only contains one column then return a Series

prefix : str, default None

Prefix to add to column numbers when no header, e.g. ‘X’ for X0, X1, ...

mangle_dupe_cols : boolean, default True

Duplicate columns will be specified as ‘X.0’...’X.N’, rather than ‘X’...’X’

dtype : Type name or dict of column -> type, default None

Data type for data or columns. E.g. {‘a’: np.float64, ‘b’: np.int32} (Unsupported with engine=’python’). Use str or object to preserve and not interpret dtype.

converters : dict, default None

Dict of functions for converting values in certain columns. Keys can either be integers or column labels

true_values : list, default None

Values to consider as True

false_values : list, default None

Values to consider as False

skipinitialspace : boolean, default False

Skip spaces after delimiter.

skiprows : list-like or integer, default None

Line numbers to skip (0-indexed) or number of lines to skip (int) at the start of the file

skipfooter : int, default 0

Number of lines at bottom of file to skip (Unsupported with engine=’c’)

nrows : int, default None

Number of rows of file to read. Useful for reading pieces of large files

na_values : str or list-like or dict, default None

Additional strings to recognize as NA/NaN. If dict passed, specific per-column NA values. By default the following values are interpreted as NaN: ‘’, ‘#N/A’, ‘#N/A N/A’, ‘#NA’, ‘-1.#IND’, ‘-1.#QNAN’, ‘-NaN’, ‘-nan’, ‘1.#IND’, ‘1.#QNAN’, ‘N/A’, ‘NA’, ‘NULL’, ‘NaN’, ‘nan’.

keep_default_na : bool, default True

If na_values are specified and keep_default_na is False the default NaN values are overridden, otherwise they’re appended to.

na_filter : boolean, default True

Detect missing value markers (empty strings and the value of na_values). In data without any NAs, passing na_filter=False can improve the performance of reading a large file

verbose : boolean, default False

Indicate number of NA values placed in non-numeric columns

skip_blank_lines : boolean, default True

If True, skip over blank lines rather than interpreting as NaN values

parse_dates : boolean or list of ints or names or list of lists or dict, default False

• boolean. If True -> try parsing the index.

• list of ints or names. e.g. If [1, 2, 3] -> try parsing columns 1, 2, 3 each as a separate date column.

• list of lists. e.g. If [[1, 3]] -> combine columns 1 and 3 and parse as

  a single date column.

• dict, e.g. {‘foo’ : [1, 3]} -> parse columns 1, 3 as date and call result ‘foo’

Note: A fast-path exists for iso8601-formatted dates.

infer_datetime_format : boolean, default False

If True and parse_dates is enabled for a column, attempt to infer the datetime format to speed up the processing

keep_date_col : boolean, default False

If True and parse_dates specifies combining multiple columns then keep the original columns.

date_parser : function, default None

Function to use for converting a sequence of string columns to an array of datetime instances. The default uses dateutil.parser.parser to do the conversion. Pandas will try to call date_parser in three different ways, advancing to the next if an exception occurs: 1) Pass one or more arrays (as defined by parse_dates) as arguments; 2) concatenate (row-wise) the string values from the columns defined by parse_dates into a single array and pass that; and 3) call date_parser once for each row using one or more strings (corresponding to the columns defined by parse_dates) as arguments.

dayfirst : boolean, default False

DD/MM format dates, international and European format

iterator : boolean, default False

Return TextFileReader object for iteration or getting chunks with get_chunk().

chunksize : int, default None

Return TextFileReader object for iteration. See IO Tools docs for more information on iterator and chunksize.

compression : {‘infer’, ‘gzip’, ‘bz2’, None}, default ‘infer’

For on-the-fly decompression of on-disk data. If ‘infer’, then use gzip or bz2 if filepath_or_buffer is a string ending in ‘.gz’ or ‘.bz2’, respectively, and no decompression otherwise. Set to None for no decompression.

thousands : str, default None

Thousands separator

decimal : str, default ‘.’

Character to recognize as decimal point (e.g. use ‘,’ for European data).

lineterminator : str (length 1), default None

Character to break file into lines. Only valid with C parser.

quotechar : str (length 1), optional

The character used to denote the start and end of a quoted item. Quoted items can include the delimiter and it will be ignored.

quoting : int or csv.QUOTE_* instance, default None

Control field quoting behavior per csv.QUOTE_* constants. Use one of QUOTE_MINIMAL (0), QUOTE_ALL (1), QUOTE_NONNUMERIC (2) or QUOTE_NONE (3). Default (None) results in QUOTE_MINIMAL behavior.

escapechar : str (length 1), default None

One-character string used to escape delimiter when quoting is QUOTE_NONE.

comment : str, default None

Indicates remainder of line should not be parsed. If found at the beginning of a line, the line will be ignored altogether. This parameter must be a single character. Like empty lines (as long as skip_blank_lines=True), fully commented lines are ignored by the parameter header but not by skiprows. For example, if comment=’#’, parsing ‘#emptyna,b,cn1,2,3’ with header=0 will result in ‘a,b,c’ being treated as the header.

encoding : str, default None

Encoding to use for UTF when reading/writing (ex. ‘utf-8’). List of Python standard encodings

dialect : str or csv.Dialect instance, default None

If None defaults to Excel dialect. Ignored if sep longer than 1 char See csv.Dialect documentation for more details

tupleize_cols : boolean, default False

Leave a list of tuples on columns as is (default is to convert to a Multi Index on the columns)

error_bad_lines : boolean, default True

Lines with too many fields (e.g. a csv line with too many commas) will by default cause an exception to be raised, and no DataFrame will be returned. If False, then these “bad lines” will dropped from the DataFrame that is returned. (Only valid with C parser)

warn_bad_lines : boolean, default True

If error_bad_lines is False, and warn_bad_lines is True, a warning for each “bad line” will be output. (Only valid with C parser).

Returns:

result : DataFrame or TextParser

Also, ‘delimiter’ is used to specify the filler character of the

fields if it is not spaces (e.g., ‘~’).