# Display more decimals in DataFrame

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** dataframes, prettytables\
**Created:** [March 30, 2019, 4:08pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545 "2019-03-30T16:08:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 10\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tk3369](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tk3369/32/2824_2.png) [@tk3369](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tk3369)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2019, 4:08pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/1 "2019-03-30T16:08:16Z")

</div>

How do I make DataFrame to display more decimals in the REPL? e.g.

```julia
x = DataFrame(a=[1.142300004,1.142300051])

2×1 DataFrame
│ Row │ a │
│ │ Float64 │
├─────┼─────────┤
│ 1 │ 1.1423 │
│ 2 │ 1.1423 │

```

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![aharoun](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/aharoun/32/6887_2.png) [@aharoun](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/aharoun)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2019, 5:14pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/2 "2019-03-30T17:14:40Z")

</div>

May not be the best practice but the following seems to work (in the expense of affecting the display format of all `Float64`’s)

```julia
julia> Base.show(io::IO, t::Float64) = @printf io "%1.9f" t

julia> x = DataFrame(a=[1.142300004,1.142300051])
2×1 DataFrame
│ Row │ a │
│ │ Float64 │
├─────┼─────────────┤
│ 1 │ 1.142300004 │
│ 2 │ 1.142300051 │

```

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![longemen3000](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/longemen3000/32/7298_2.png) [@longemen3000](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/longemen3000)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2019, 11:04pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/3 "2019-03-30T23:04:21Z")

</div>

there is a good package for displaying tables on the terminal, [PrettyTables.jl](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-prettytables-jl-print-formatted-tables-in-julia/19550), an example:

```julia
using DataFrames, PrettyTables
x = DataFrame(a=[1.142300004,1.142300051])
pretty_table(x)
┌─────────────┐
│ a │
│ Float64 │
├─────────────┤
│ 1.142300004 │
│ 1.142300051 │
└─────────────┘

```

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ronis\_BR](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/ronis_br/32/50999_2.png) [@Ronis\_BR](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Ronis_BR)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2019, 11:07pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/4 "2019-03-30T23:07:09Z")

</div>

Yes! And if you use PrettyTables.jl, then you can use the formatters and print the numbers anyway you like. If you feel something is missing, please let me know 🙂

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tk3369](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tk3369/32/2824_2.png) [@tk3369](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tk3369)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 4:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/5 "2019-03-31T16:34:56Z")

</div>

@longemen3000 and @Ronis_BR - thanks for the suggestions.

Tweaking the `Base.show` function is a nice hack. I’m afraid about other side effects though. Nonetheless it solves the problem.

The `pretty_table` function works but it’s slow for large table - it took 20 seconds to display for my 6mm row x 2 column table.

**Just some more thoughts -**

I thought `IOContext` could come to rescue, as in the following example:

```julia
julia> show(IOContext(stdout, :compact => true), 1.142300004)
1.1423
julia> show(IOContext(stdout, :compact => false), 1.142300004)
1.142300004

```

But, the same trick doesn’t work for DataFrames.

```julia
julia> show(IOContext(stdout, :compact => false), x)
2×1 DataFrame
│ Row │ a │
│ │ Float64 │
├─────┼─────────┤
│ 1 │ 1.1423 │
│ 2 │ 1.1423 │

```

It would be nice if the context can be passed all the way. Or, it’s even better if a `:precision` setting can be passed via the context. @bkamins what do you think?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bkamins](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/bkamins/32/208538_2.png) [@bkamins](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/bkamins)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:12pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/6 "2019-03-31T17:12:37Z")

</div>

1. It is very easy to make DataFrames.jl respect `:compact` property. If you think it is worth to add it please open an Issue on GitHub. I can implement the change and it can be discussed there.
2. If something more sophisticated were needed I would rather have `:renderer` (or some similar name) property where you could pass a custom function replacing the default way DataFrames.jl converts values into strings for display purposes.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tk3369](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tk3369/32/2824_2.png) [@tk3369](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tk3369)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:32pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/7 "2019-03-31T17:32:27Z")

</div>

Both sounds like great ideas! It makes me more greedy now 🙂

I can open an issue there for further discussions.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ronis\_BR](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/ronis_br/32/50999_2.png) [@Ronis\_BR](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Ronis_BR)\
**Post date:** [April 1, 2019, 3:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/8 "2019-04-01T15:58:03Z")

</div>

> [@tk3369](#):
>
> The `pretty_table` function works but it’s slow for large table - it took 20 seconds to display for my 6mm row x 2 column table.

Hi @tk3369,

Actually it was kind of a bug in [PrettyTables.jl](https://github.com/ronisbr/PrettyTables.jl).

The problem is: to provide a lot of formatting capabilities, we need to process the entire table before printing it, _i.e._ to convert every entry to string. If you are printing a table with 6,000,000 rows, then it will be very slow because we need to check the size of each element, apply the formats, etc. However, for default printing (cropping the output to fit the screen, like the default behavior in Julia), we do not need to convert the entire matrix, only those lines / columns that will appear.

Hence, I have tagged a new version of PrettyTables.jl (v0.4.1) that fixes this problem. Now, printing a table with 6,000,000 takes less than 0,2s:

```julia
julia> A = randn(6_000_000,2);

julia> @time pretty_table(A)
┌──────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│ Col. 1 │ Col. 2 │
├──────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ -1.5708105270195982 │ 0.5849721303958696 │
│ -0.18240834262933073 │ 2.297072454147525 │
│ 3.038226193453734 │ -1.053995983297294 │
│ -0.4521717844067924 │ 0.24068452887469385 │
│ -1.0036693148726834 │ 1.3231192378011667 │
│ -1.0912654369677268 │ 0.07918736934992252 │
│ -1.7374054279253734 │ -0.48331939530398493 │
│ 0.711235697419586 │ 0.13195834920782662 │
│ 0.5730496383457973 │ 0.31378900621944894 │
│ -0.2852634109648003 │ -0.41608014915233066 │
│ 1.1752714990244069 │ -0.6651023540551017 │
│ -0.01302333291340418 │ -0.7285514485011084 │
│ 0.892405345306186 │ 0.5782248658188986 │
│ -0.34061548058754576 │ -2.36534519685229 │
│ -0.6444713255802805 │ 1.2357514702560206 │
│ -0.1637680099888764 │ -0.24256742808025103 │
│ -0.442464606793289 │ 1.4713960791728553 │
│ 0.24643436155394485 │ 0.6565996153774774 │
│ -1.3875142117660895 │ 0.5376088505913476 │
│ -0.4771557567644743 │ -1.648645221341626 │
│ 0.5300907816993856 │ 1.2681887723331997 │
│ 2.4628192182971866 │ -0.9386710121889111 │
│ 0.7932936634888795 │ -1.539282914842811 │
│ -0.7819474124799908 │ 0.17471592555458548 │
│ 1.4122772642519938 │ 1.7101655089219512 │
│ 0.544239586271703 │ 1.5501441864921355 │
│ -0.8011567261844883 │ 0.5573234867787404 │
│ 0.5466673104345015 │ -1.445852038822783 │
│ -2.6435832343401464 │ 1.058476049459767 │
│ 0.835091258446735 │ -1.1831995330500964 │
│ -0.08963293149512457 │ -1.5665514952683073 │
│ 0.6917000348450123 │ 1.745435162680872 │
│ 2.0383430047135245 │ -0.5926896235283556 │
│ 0.9125870984077767 │ -0.7465508196307007 │
│ 0.7137596621623102 │ -0.6798703096596058 │
│ -0.9962745074964077 │ 0.6635460632776334 │
│ 1.0114147162983365 │ -0.5128772869544962 │
│ -0.5739645602650018 │ -0.16668185162965135 │
│ -0.0671281071488013 │ -1.3142292562497255 │
│ -0.15487193175125383 │ 1.4284413652774037 │
│ -1.1900934971232457 │ -0.5883720211137512 │
│ 0.9355445352841825 │ 1.09238485599259 │
│ -2.7938345777067863 │ -0.9465073717450541 │
│ 0.023128382966333787 │ -0.6316322682344331 │
│ 0.23656405073467132 │ 1.5190501597674642 │
│ ⋮ │ ⋮ │
└──────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘
  0.080995 seconds (3.74 k allocations: 51.669 MiB, 67.51% gc time)

```

Of course, if you want to actually print the entire table formatted with PrettyTables, then it will still take a lot.

I think in the future we can improve that by avoiding the initial processing if the user wants by passing / guessing a fixed column size.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AndreLC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7ab992/32.png) [@AndreLC](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/AndreLC)\
**Post date:** [June 21, 2021, 12:47pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/9 "2021-06-21T12:47:37Z")

</div>

Would you have a link to the issue regarding the point 2. in [@bkamins suggestion](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/6)?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bkamins](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/bkamins/32/208538_2.png) [@bkamins](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/bkamins)\
**Post date:** [June 21, 2021, 2:13pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/display-more-decimals-in-dataframe/22545/10 "2021-06-21T14:13:00Z")

</div>

Currently DataFrames.jl has fully switched to PrettyTables.jl for text/plain display, so I would recommend you to check out the options PrettyTables.jl currently offers.