craftable — craft elegant tables using format strings

Generate clean, flexible text tables in the terminal or in text files using a familiar, Python-native formatting approach. craftable focuses on attractive and predictable output, zero dependencies, a simple and elegant API, and fast rendering without requiring a full TUI library.

• Small, zero-dependency API
• Works with plain Python data (lists/rows)
• Built-in adapters for dicts, dataclasses, numpy, pandas, SQL, and more
• Column definitions use Python's format mini-language
• Multiple built-in styles: no borders, box drawing, rounded, ASCII, Markdown
• Supports wrapping, truncation, alignment, and auto-fill columns
• Simple, but flexible and extensible to meet most any use case

Quick example

from craftable import get_table

data = [
    ["Alice", 147000, .035, "Engineer"],
    ["Bob", 88000, .0433, "Designer"],
]

print(get_table(
    data,
    header_row=["Name", "Salary", "Adj", "Title"],
    col_defs=["A","<$ (,)", ">.2%", "A"],
    table_width=50,
))

Output:

      Name     │   Salary  │  Adj  │    Title     
───────────────┼───────────┼───────┼──────────────
 Alice         │ $ 147,000 │ 3.50% │ Engineer     
 Bob           │ $  88,000 │ 4.33% │ Designer     

Data Adapters

Convert Python data structures directly into tables with built-in adapters:

from craftable import get_table
from craftable.adapters import from_dicts

# List of dictionaries (handles missing keys gracefully)
data = [
    {"name": "Alice", "age": 30, "city": "LA"},
    {"name": "Bob", "age": 25},  # missing 'city'
]

rows, headers = from_dicts(data)
print(get_table(rows, header_row=headers))

Adapters available for: dicts, dataclasses, numpy arrays, pandas/polars DataFrames, SQL cursors, and more. See the Adapters documentation for details.

When to use craftable

Use craftable when you need reliable text tables in logs, CLIs, or scripts, and want the control of Python format specs without heavy UI tooling. If you need interactive widgets or color/styling, consider pairing with Rich — but for static tables, craftable is intentionally simple and fast.

Getting Started

Read the online documentation:

https://ptyork.github.io/craftable

Available as craftable in PyPI with zero additional dependencies, so you can install or add to your project using your favorite package manager.

pip

pip install craftable

poetry

poetry add craftable

uv

uv add craftable

Or if using uv pip:

uv pip install craftable