mkdocs-table-reader-plugin 0.5

MkDocs plugin to directly insert tables from files into markdown.

mkdocs-table-reader-plugin

MkDocs plugin that adds a {{ read_csv('table.csv') }} markdown tag to directly insert CSV files as a table into a page. See it in action at timvink.github.io/mkdocs-table-reader-plugin/.

This makes it easier to build reproducible reports. For more complex use cases, consider mknotebooks, mkdocs-markdownextradata-plugin or mkdocs-macros-plugin.

Setup

Install the plugin using pip3:

pip3 install mkdocs-table-reader-plugin

Next, add the following lines to your mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - search
  - table-reader

If you have no plugins entry in your config file yet, you'll likely also want to add the search plugin. MkDocs enables it by default if there is no plugins entry set.

Usage

In your markdown documents you can now use:

{{ read_csv('path_to_table.csv') }}

Where the path is relative to the location of your project's mkdocs.yml file.

Under the hood this is basically:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('path_to_table.csv')
df.to_markdown(index=False, tablefmt='pipe')

Which means you can pass all parameters of pandas.read_csv().

You can see an example usage in this repo (see mkdocs.yml and docs/) and the result at timvink.github.io/mkdocs-table-reader-plugin/.

Available readers

The following table reader functions are available:

• {{ read_csv() }} passed to pandas.read_csv().
• {{ read_table() }} passed to pandas.read_table().
• {{ read_fwf() }} passed to pandas.read_fwf().
• {{ read_excel() }} passed to pandas.read_excel().
• {{ read_yaml() }} is parsed with yaml.safe_load() and passed to pandas.json_normalize().

Reading xlsx files

You might get a XLRDError('Excel xlsx file; not supported',) error when trying to read modern excel files. That's because xlrd does not support .xlsx files (stackoverflow post). Instead, install openpyxl and use:

{{ read_excel('tables/excel_table.xlsx', engine='openpyxl') }}

Reading yaml variables

mkdocs-markdownextradata-plugin is a great plugin to use when working with yaml files. It will read in all yaml files in a specified directory and make all keys available as jinja2 variables.

Options

You can customize the plugin by setting options in mkdocs.yml. For example:

plugins:
  - table-reader:
      data_path: "docs"

data_path

Default is ., which means you can specify the path to your table files relative to the location of your project's mkdocs.yml file. If you use a folder for all your table files you can shorten the path specification by setting data_path.

For example, if you set data_path to docs/ in the project below, you will be able to use {{ read_csv("basic_table.csv") }} instead of {{ read_csv("docs/basic_table.csv") }} inside index.md.

.
├── docs
│   ├── basic_table.csv
│   └── index.md
└── mkdocs.yml

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before putting in any work.