DOC: add doc for reading from DataFrame.to_html

[cpcloud]

No description provided.

[jreback]

ok to merge?

[cpcloud]

just added more notes, so yep

[jreback]

dont' use assert_frame_equal in the v0.11.1...instead print out the table
I would not use df_list, maybe alist or something (you note that the return type is a list is good and would leave that in though)
e.g. alist[0] (or alist[0].head()) if its too long

[jreback]

perfect!

fyi....since its ipython, the print is not necessary....

[cpcloud]

cool. i figured. pre-ipdb debugging habits die hard!

[jreback]

hmm....can you rebase on top of master?

[cpcloud]

Yeah sorry. Will do when I get to a machine...

[cpcloud]

@jreback rebased.

[jreback]

something failed......

https://www.travis-ci.org/cpcloud/pandas/jobs/7363117

[cpcloud]

yep saw it i'm on it, i'm getting a different error locally about recursion depth...

[cpcloud]

prolly cause i changed the default of infer types...and thus everything is evil object arrays

[cpcloud]

@jreback any changes to assert_frame_equal recently? not made by me...

[cpcloud]

ugh why does assert a == b, "%s != %s" % (a, b) not cause a recursion error but assert a == b, "{0} != {1}".format(a, b) does?!

[jreback]

I think @y-p changed something...didn't seem to affect me

(btw you can NOT have it compare dtypes, there is an option)

but I think you should have infer_dtypes=True by default, it makes sense
(or at least maybe do floats/ints by default), even dates really
people can always turn it off

[cpcloud]

ok...the example of reading in the output of df.to_html() will fail because DataFrame(['a']).convert_objects(convert_dates='coerce') thinks 'a' is a date. i will just use soft conversion then

[jreback]

yeh...dates are tough (though coerce will only convert if at least 1 item is a date)......(if all are not dates then it will leave it)

[cpcloud]

wait but why is 'a' considered a date?

[jreback]

what is in the series? a (alone) shouldn't trigger it

[cpcloud]

if u just do

s = Series(['a']).convert_objects(convert_dates='coerce')

s now has a date. I think this is a bug...

[jreback]

evil! I can see 'today' being parsed to today, but a????

(Pdb) import dateutil
(Pdb) dateutil.parser.parse('a')
datetime.datetime(2013, 5, 21, 0, 0)

[cpcloud]

@jreback travis is now all green

[cpcloud]

ah yes when parsers become too powerful and take over the world! mwahaha!

[cpcloud]

it's because 'a' is a token for 'am'

[cpcloud]

and also the default of just returning the current time kicks in since the parse of 'a' returns None.

[cpcloud]

kind of insane if u ask me...

[jreback]

a,m,p,t are the offenders (I check them all now).....so odd, you would think you could turn this option off

[jreback]

see #3671

[jreback]

ok...merging.....after my PR you can decide if you want to turn convert_dates back on (or even make it a separate option to read_html)

[jreback]

@cpcloud if u have a chance
can u do a pr for read/write html in main docs (your read examples in v0.11.1 are prob good start)
at some point want to go thru the options that u allow a bit more in a doc example

and I don't think any docs for to_html

thxs

[cpcloud]

@jreback btw should the to_* collection of methods allow str in the buf argument (a file name)? i'm surprised that no one has raised this yet...

[cpcloud]

maybe someone has and there's a reason for not supporting it...i haven't looked through issues for it

[jreback]

as far as I know these methods should accept path_or_buf
may not be consistent

[cpcloud]

ok i will open a pr for any inconsistencies i find with that

[cpcloud]

@jreback would u mind if i show the html output as rendered html in the examples? that way a user gets the final result and doesn't have to open up browser to see the rendered html...

[jreback]

that would be nice

[cpcloud]

hm how do u feel about a bunch of html files in a subdirectory of source? don't think there's any thing like a context manager for sphinx

[jreback]

I think you can put what you need in doc/source/_static; this is how the .png get read in the plotting docs

[jreback]

as an example, I do this is io.rst (for showing how to read a legacy file)

    .. ipython:: python
        :suppress:

        import os
        legacy_file_path = os.path.abspath('source/_static/legacy_0.10.h5')

     .. ipython:: python

        # a legacy store
        legacy_store = HDFStore(legacy_file_path,'r')
        legacy_store

        # copy (and return the new handle)
            new_store = legacy_store.copy('store_new.h5')
            new_store
        new_store.close()