python - Pretty printing newlines inside a string in a Pandas DataFrame

Question

I have a Pandas DataFrame in which one of the columns contains string elements, and those string elements contain new lines that I would like to print literally. But they just appear as in the output.

That is, I want to print this:

  pos     bidder
0   1
1   2
2   3  <- alice
       <- bob
3   4

but this is what I get:

  pos            bidder
0   1
1   2
2   3  <- alice
<- bob
3   4

How can I accomplish what I want? Can I use a DataFrame, or will I have to revert to manually printing padded columns one row at a time?

Here's what I have so far:

n = 4
output = pd.DataFrame({
    'pos': range(1, n+1),
    'bidder': [''] * n
})
bids = {'alice': 3, 'bob': 3}
used_pos = []
for bidder, pos in bids.items():
    if pos in used_pos:
        arrow = output.ix[pos, 'bidder']
        output.ix[pos, 'bidder'] = arrow + "
<- %s" % bidder
    else:
        output.ix[pos, 'bidder'] = "<- %s" % bidder
print(output)

Answer 1

If you're trying to do this in ipython notebook, you can do:

from IPython.display import display, HTML

def pretty_print(df):
    return display( HTML( df.to_html().replace("\n","<br>") ) )