Improve DataFrame.to_string()

[darkdragon-001]

Add the following options:

• Draw borders: specify border characters and which ones to draw (similar to texttable)
  • Allow multi-line cells for long strings instead of truncation (they are visually separated by the borders)
• Use Markdown table format. This could also be implemented in a separate to_markdown() function. (Duplicate of DataFrame could have a to_markdown method. #11052)

[TomAugspurger]

Can you make your request more explicit? As is, it'll be hard to tell whether this issue is in scope, or when it is closable.

[darkdragon-001]

@TomAugspurger I updated the issue. Is it better now?

[TomAugspurger]

A to_markdown() is discussed in #11052. That seems to cover all of your usecases, right? I don't think that to_string is likely to gain support for delimiters. It's already quite complex.

[darkdragon-001]

Thanks for the hint to the to_markdown() discussion.

Multi-line cells would still be nice though, but don't make sense without delimiter support.
For now, this can also be achieved by using tabulate with another format, which was mentioned in the other issue. Although line break needs to be inserted manually and can't be inserted automatically based on column width.

[WillAyd]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll be frank in that I'm slightly against this as I don't see it being generally super useful for the complexity I think it would add to the code base

[TomAugspurger]

I don’t think you can do multilingual without delimiters, so this all sounds like a to_markdown