---
id: pytablewriter
version: "1.2.1"
license: MIT License
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# pytablewriter — pytablewriter is a Python library to write a table in various formats: AsciiDoc / CSV / Elasticsearch / HTML / JavaScript / JSON / LaTeX / LDJSON / LTSV / Markdown / MediaWiki / NumPy / Excel / Pandas / Python / reStructuredText / SQLite / TOML / TSV / YAML.

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 14.0M/mo

## What it is and what it does

pytablewriter is a table serialization library that takes tabular data—from nested lists, CSV, pandas DataFrames, or other sources—and renders it into output formats spanning text markup (Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, reStructuredText), data interchange (JSON, YAML, TOML), spreadsheets (Excel, SQLite), and specialized formats (Elasticsearch, JavaScript, NumPy, Pandas source code). It handles automatic cell alignment, padding, number formatting, and optional styling like text color and font weight.

The library is designed for developers who need to generate formatted tables programmatically—whether for documentation, reports, data export, or display in notebooks. It abstracts away format-specific syntax so you write data once and output it in multiple formats by changing the writer class. Dependencies include setuptools, DataProperty, mbstrdecoder, pathvalidate, tabledata, tcolorpy, and typepy, all of which handle data validation, encoding, and styling concerns.

Use it for:

- Generate Markdown tables for README files or documentation from Python data structures
- Export analysis results to Excel or CSV for sharing with non-technical stakeholders
- Create HTML tables for web pages or email reports from pandas DataFrames
- Build reStructuredText grid tables for Sphinx documentation from nested lists
- Serialize structured data to JSON or YAML formats for API responses or config files
- Write SQLite tables from in-memory data for persistence and querying

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Converts tabular data into formatted tables for output in multiple text, binary, and application-specific formats including Markdown, HTML, CSV, JSON, Excel, LaTeX, and SQLite.

Yes. pytablewriter is stable (Production/Stable status), actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, and solves a concrete problem—multi-format table serialization—with low install friction. Install it if you need to generate formatted tables in any of its supported output formats; skip it only if your use case is limited to a single format where a simpler, format-specific library would suffice.

## Install

pip install pytablewriter
uv add pytablewriter
poetry add pytablewriter

## Installing pytablewriter

Before you install: Low friction installation with a pure-Python wheel. Active maintenance with recent commits; 7 runtime dependencies are all established libraries. No known vulnerabilities.

License in practice: MIT License permits commercial and private use with minimal restrictions; attribution required.

Quickstart:

pip install pytablewriter

from pytablewriter import MarkdownTableWriter

writer = MarkdownTableWriter(
    headers=["Name", "Value"],
    value_matrix=[["A", 1], ["B", 2]]
)
writer.write_table()

Verify before relying:

- Performance characteristics with large datasets or deeply nested structures
- Memory overhead when writing to multiple formats simultaneously
- Behavior and compatibility with non-ASCII characters in all supported formats
- Exact count of supported output formats beyond those explicitly named in documentation

## Package facts

- License: MIT License (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 14.0M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

table formatting library, convert data to markdown table, generate html tables from data, export to csv json excel, tabular data writer, format table output, data to multiple formats, table-serialization, data-export, markup-generation

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/pytablewriter) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/pytablewriter/)