tabl 1.2.3

Lightweight, intuitive and fast data-tables. Forked from github.com/BastiaanBergman/tabel

About Tabel

Lightweight, intuitive and fast data-tables.

Tabel data-tables are tables with columns and column names, rows and row numbers. Indexing and slicing your data is analogous to numpy array’s. The only real difference is that each column can have its own data type.

Design objectives

I got frustrated with pandas: it’s complicated slicing syntax (.loc, .x, .iloc, .. etc), it’s enforced index column and the Series objects I get when I want a numpy array. With Tabel I created the simplified pandas I need for many of my data-jobs. Just focussing on simple slicing of multi-datatype tables and basic table tools.

• Intuitive simple slicing.

• Using numpy machinery, for best performance, integration with other tools and future support.

• Store data by column numpy arrays (column store).

• No particular index column, all columns can be used as the index, the choice is up to the user.

• Fundamental necessities for sorting, grouping, joining and appending tables.

Install

pip install tabel

Quickstart

init

To setup a Tabel:

>>> from tabel import Tabel
>>> tabl = Tabel([ ["John", "Joe", "Jane"],
...                [1.82,1.65,2.15],
...                [False,False,True]], columns = ["Name", "Height", "Married"])
>>> tabl
 Name   |   Height |   Married
--------+----------+-----------
 John   |     1.82 |         0
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1
3 rows ['<U4', '<f8', '|b1']

Alternatively, Tabels can be setup from dictionaries, numpy arrays, pandas DataFrames, or no data at all. Database connectors usually return data as a list of records, the module provides a convenience function to transpose this into a list of columns.

slice

Slicing can be done the numpy way, always returning Tabel objects:

>>> tabl[1:3,[0,2]]
 Name   |   Married
--------+-----------
 Joe    |         0
 Jane   |         1
2 rows ['<U4', '|b1']

Slices will always return a Tabel except in three distinct cases, when:

1. explicitly one column is requested, a numpy array is returned:

>>> tabl[1:3,'Name']       # doctest: +SKIP
array(['Joe', 'Jane'],
      dtype='<U4')

2. explicitly one row is requested, a tuple is returned:

>>> tabl[0,:]
('John', 1.82, False)

3. explicitly one element is requested:

>>> tabl[0,'Name']
'John'

In general, slicing is intuitive and does not deviate from what would expect from numpy. With the one addition that columns can be referred to by names as well as numbers.

set

Setting elements works the same as slicing:

>>> tabl = Tabel({'Name' : ["John", "Joe", "Jane"], 'Height' : [1.82,1.65,2.15], 'Married': [False,False,True]})
>>> tabl[0,"Name"] = "Jos"
>>> tabl
 Name   |   Height |   Married
--------+----------+-----------
 Jos    |     1.82 |         0
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1
3 rows ['<U4', '<f8', '|b1']

The datatype that the value is expected to have, is the same as the datatype a slice would result into.

Adding columns, works the same as setting elements, just give it a new name:

>>> tabl = Tabel({'Name' : ["John", "Joe", "Jane"], 'Height' : [1.82,1.65,2.15], 'Married': [False,False,True]})
>>> tabl['new'] = [1,2,3]
>>> tabl
 Name   |   Height |   Married |   new
--------+----------+-----------+-------
 John   |     1.82 |         0 |     1
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0 |     2
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1 |     3
3 rows ['<U4', '<f8', '|b1', '<i8']

Or set the whole column to the same value:

>>> tabl = Tabel({'Name' : ["John", "Joe", "Jane"], 'Height' : [1.82,1.65,2.15], 'Married': [False,False,True]})
>>> tabl['new'] = 13
>>> tabl
 Name   |   Height |   Married |   new
--------+----------+-----------+-------
 John   |     1.82 |         0 |    13
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0 |    13
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1 |    13
3 rows ['<U4', '<f8', '|b1', '<i8']

Just like numpy, slices are not actual copies of the data, rather they are references.

append Tabel and row

Tabels can be appended with other Tabels:

>>> tabl = Tabel({'Name' : ["John", "Joe", "Jane"], 'Height' : [1.82,1.65,2.15], 'Married': [False,False,True]})
>>> tabl += tabl
>>> tabl
 Name   |   Height |   Married
--------+----------+-----------
 John   |     1.82 |         0
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1
 John   |     1.82 |         0
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1
6 rows ['<U4', '<f8', '|b1']

Or append rows as dictionary:

>>> tabl = Tabel({'Name' : ["John", "Joe", "Jane"], 'Height' : [1.82,1.65,2.15], 'Married': [False,False,True]})
>>> tabl.row_append({'Height':1.81, 'Name':"Jack", 'Married':True})
>>> tabl
 Name   |   Height |   Married
--------+----------+-----------
 John   |     1.82 |         0
 Joe    |     1.65 |         0
 Jane   |     2.15 |         1
 Jack   |     1.81 |         1
4 rows ['<U4', '<f8', '|b1']

instance properties

Your data is simply stored as a list of numpy arrays and can be accessed or manipulated like that (just don’t make a mess):

>>> tabl = Tabel({'Name' : ["John", "Joe", "Jane"], 'Height' : [1.82,1.65,2.15], 'Married': [False,False,True]})
>>> tabl.columns
['Name', 'Height', 'Married']
>>> tabl.data        # doctest: +SKIP
[array(['John', 'Joe', 'Jane'],
      dtype='<U4'), array([ 1.82,  1.65,  2.15]), array([False, False,  True], dtype=bool)]

Further the basic means to asses the size of your data:

>>> tabl.shape
(3, 3)
>>> len(tabl)
3

pandas

For for interfacing with the popular datatable framework, going back and forth is easy:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> df = pd.DataFrame({'a':range(3),'b':range(10,13)})
>>> df
   a   b
0  0  10
1  1  11
2  2  12

To make a Tabel from a DataFrame, just supply it to the initialize:

>>> tabl = Tabel(df)
>>> tabl
   a |   b
-----+-----
   0 |  10
   1 |  11
   2 |  12
3 rows ['<i8', '<i8']

The dict property of Tabel provides a way to make a DataFrame from a Tabel:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame(tabl.dict)
>>> df
   a   b
0  0  10
1  1  11
2  2  12

Resources & getting help

• See for the full API and more examples the documentation on RTD.

• The repository on Github.

• Installables on pip.

• Questions and answers on StackOverflow, I will try to monitor for it.

Stable releases

• tabel 1.2.3

  • Added __delitem__ feature to delete row(s) or a column.

• tabel 1.2.2

  • Added argument to save and read methods for csv and gz formats to specify whether or not to write/read a header with the column names. For reading header can be left to None for automatic sniffing of the header. Default is True for both read and save methods.

• tabel 1.2.1

  • Removed unicode characters from description to fix pip install issue <https://github.com/BastiaanBergman/tabel/issues/6#issue-440282452>.

• tabel 1.2.0

  • Fix for numpy 1.15.5 “warnings”

  • Fix for outerjoin to raise an error in case of unsupported datatypes

• tabel 1.1

  • Added join and group_by methods

  • September 27, 2018

• tabel 1.0

  • First release

  • September 8, 2018

Dependencies

• numpy

• tabulate (optional, recommended)

• pandas (optional, for converting back and forth to DataFrames)

Tested on:

• Python 3.6.4; numpy 1.15.4

• Python 3.6.4; numpy 1.14.3

• Python 2.7.14; numpy 1.14.0

Contributing to Tabel

Tabel is perfect already, no more contributions needed. Just kidding!

See the repository for filing issues and proposing enhancements.

git:

• Using master as the development branch

• Every new version is branched of of master (after its finished) into its own “v1.2.3” named branch. Subsequent version specific fixes can be done in the version branches.

I’m using pytest, pylint, doctest, sphynx and setuptools.

• git

  git checkout master
  git pull

• pytest

  cd tabel/test
  conda activate py3_6
  pytest
  conda activate py2_7
  pytest

• pylint

  cd tabel/
  ./pylint.sh

• doctest

  cd tabel/docs
  make doctest

• sphynx

  cd tabel/docs
  make html

• setuptools/pypi

  python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
  twine upload dist/tabel-1.1.0.*

• git

  git add .
  git commit -m
  git push
  git checkout v1.2.3 -b
  git push --set-upstream origin v1.2.3

Contributors

Just me, Bastiaan Bergman [[e-mail]].

What’s in the name?

Tabel is Dutch for table (two-dimensional enlisting), wiktionary. The english word table, as in “dinner table”, translates in Dutch to tafel. The Dutch word tafel is an old fashioned word for data-table, mostly used for calculation tables which itself is old fashioned as well.

ToDo

• polish error messages and validity checking and add testing for it.

• cache buffers for faster appending: store temp in list and concatenate to array only once we use another method

• allow for (sparse) numpy arrays as an element

• adjust & limit __repr__ width for very wide Tabels in jupyter cell

• items() and row_items() and keys() and values() method

• pop_column method

• tox - environment testing

• set subsets of tabels with (subsets) of other tabels, seems logic as __setitem__ is allowed to provide the datatype that should have come from a __getitem__

• datetime column support

• add disk datalogger