DataFrame header is misaligned when column names contain tabs

[drewfrank]

Like it says in the title:

In [10]: pd.DataFrame([{"a\tb": 1, "c": 2}])
Out[10]: 
   a    b  c
0    1  2

[wesm]

Fun. I guess the $64,000 question is whether there's a consistent way to see how the user's console displays a tab stop

[drewfrank]

:) Yes, and I have no idea if that's possible. Maybe an alternative would be to display the tab escape sequence:

In [10]: pd.DataFrame([{"a\tb": 1, "c": 2}])
Out[10]: 
  a\tb  c
0    1  2

I would actually prefer this behavior even if magic tab alignment is possible.

[wesm]

I agree this would be preferable. Shouldn't be that difficult to do (though not as simple as writing the repr instead of str representation, because then unicode characters won't display properly)

[drewfrank]

This may have been obvious to you from the beginning, but I just realized the same thing happens when tabs are in the contents of a DataFrame (not just the header):

In [13]: pd.DataFrame([{'a': '1\t2', 'b':'3'}])
Out[13]: 
     a  b
0  1    2  3

[wesm]

thanks @y-p for taking care of this!