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# pandas.describe_option

pandas.describe_option(pat, _print_desc=False) = <pandas._config.config.CallableDynamicDoc object>

  Prints the description for one or more registered options.

  Call with no arguments to get a listing for all registered options.

  Available options:

  - compute.[use_bottleneck, use_numba, use_numexpr]

  - display.[chop_threshold, colheader_justify, date_dayfirst, date_yearfirst, encoding, expand_frame_repr, float_format]

  - display.html.[border, table_schema, use_mathjax]

  - display.[large_repr, max_categories, max_columns, max_colwidth, max_dir_items, max_info_columns, max_info_rows, max_rows, max_seq_items, memory_usage, min_rows, multi_sparse, notebook_repr_html, pprint_nest_depth, precision, show_dimensions]

  - display.unicode.[ambiguous_as_wide, east_asian_width]

  - display.[width]

  - future.[infer_string, no_silent_downcasting]

  - io.excel.ods.[reader, writer]

  - io.excel.xls.[reader]

  - io.excel.xlsb.[reader]

  - io.excel.xlsm.[reader, writer]

  - io.excel.xlsx.[reader, writer]

  - io.hdf.[default_format, dropna_table]

  - io.parquet.[engine]

  - io.sql.[engine]

  - mode.[chained_assignment, copy_on_write, data_manager, sim_interactive, string_storage, use_inf_as_na]

  - plotting.[backend]

  - plotting.matplotlib.[register_converters]

  - styler.format.[decimal, escape, formatter, na_rep, precision, thousands]

  - styler.html.[mathjax]

  - styler.latex.[environment, hrules, multicol_align, multirow_align]

  - styler.render.[encoding, max_columns, max_elements, max_rows, repr]

  - styler.sparse.[columns, index]

  Parameters:
    pat str

      Regexp pattern. All matching keys will have their description displayed.

    _print_desc bool, default True

      If True (default) the description(s) will be printed to stdout. Otherwise, the description(s) will be returned as a unicode string (for testing).

  Returns:
    None by default, the description(s) as a unicode string if _print_desc
    is False

  Notes

  Please reference the User Guide for more information.

  The available options with its descriptions:

  compute.use_bottleneckbool

    Use the bottleneck library to accelerate if it is installed, the default is True Valid values: False,True [default: True] [currently: True]

  compute.use_numbabool

    Use the numba engine option for select operations if it is installed, the default is False Valid values: False,True [default: False] [currently: False]

  compute.use_numexprbool

    Use the numexpr library to accelerate computation if it is installed, the default is True Valid values: False,True [default: True] [currently: True]

  display.chop_thresholdfloat or None

    if set to a float value, all float values smaller than the given threshold will be displayed as exactly 0 by repr and friends. [default: None] [currently: None]

  display.colheader_justify‘left’/’right’

    Controls the justification of column headers. used by DataFrameFormatter. [default: right] [currently: right]

  display.date_dayfirstboolean

    When True, prints and parses dates with the day first, eg 20/01/2005 [default: False] [currently: False]

  display.date_yearfirstboolean

    When True, prints and parses dates with the year first, eg 2005/01/20 [default: False] [currently: False]

  display.encodingstr/unicode

    Defaults to the detected encoding of the console. Specifies the encoding to be used for strings returned by to_string, these are generally strings meant to be displayed on the console. [default: utf-8] [currently: utf-8]

  display.expand_frame_reprboolean

    Whether to print out the full DataFrame repr for wide DataFrames across multiple lines, max_columns is still respected, but the output will wrap-around across multiple “pages” if its width exceeds display.width. [default: True] [currently: True]

  display.float_formatcallable

    The callable should accept a floating point number and return a string with the desired format of the number. This is used in some places like SeriesFormatter. See formats.format.EngFormatter for an example. [default: None] [currently: None]

  display.html.borderint

    A `border=value` attribute is inserted in the `<table>` tag for the DataFrame HTML repr. [default: 1] [currently: 1]

  display.html.table_schemaboolean

    Whether to publish a Table Schema representation for frontends that support it. (default: False) [default: False] [currently: False]

  display.html.use_mathjaxboolean

    When True, Jupyter notebook will process table contents using MathJax, rendering mathematical expressions enclosed by the dollar symbol. (default: True) [default: True] [currently: True]

  display.large_repr‘truncate’/’info’

    For DataFrames exceeding max_rows/max_cols, the repr (and HTML repr) can show a truncated table, or switch to the view from df.info() (the behaviour in earlier versions of pandas). [default: truncate] [currently: truncate]

  display.max_categoriesint

    This sets the maximum number of categories pandas should output when printing out a Categorical or a Series of dtype “category”. [default: 8] [currently: 8]

  display.max_columnsint

    If max_cols is exceeded, switch to truncate view. Depending on large_repr, objects are either centrally truncated or printed as a summary view. ‘None’ value means unlimited.

    In case python/IPython is running in a terminal and large_repr equals ‘truncate’ this can be set to 0 or None and pandas will auto-detect the width of the terminal and print a truncated object which fits the screen width. The IPython notebook, IPython qtconsole, or IDLE do not run in a terminal and hence it is not possible to do correct auto-detection and defaults to 20. [default: 0] [currently: 0]

  display.max_colwidthint or None

    The maximum width in characters of a column in the repr of a pandas data structure. When the column overflows, a “…” placeholder is embedded in the output. A ‘None’ value means unlimited. [default: 50] [currently: 50]

  display.max_dir_itemsint

    The number of items that will be added to dir(…). ‘None’ value means unlimited. Because dir is cached, changing this option will not immediately affect already existing dataframes until a column is deleted or added.

    This is for instance used to suggest columns from a dataframe to tab completion. [default: 100] [currently: 100]

  display.max_info_columnsint

    max_info_columns is used in DataFrame.info method to decide if per column information will be printed. [default: 100] [currently: 100]

  display.max_info_rowsint

    df.info() will usually show null-counts for each column. For large frames this can be quite slow. max_info_rows and max_info_cols limit this null check only to frames with smaller dimensions than specified. [default: 1690785] [currently: 1690785]

  display.max_rowsint

    If max_rows is exceeded, switch to truncate view. Depending on large_repr, objects are either centrally truncated or printed as a summary view. ‘None’ value means unlimited.

    In case python/IPython is running in a terminal and large_repr equals ‘truncate’ this can be set to 0 and pandas will auto-detect the height of the terminal and print a truncated object which fits the screen height. The IPython notebook, IPython qtconsole, or IDLE do not run in a terminal and hence it is not possible to do correct auto-detection. [default: 60] [currently: 60]

  display.max_seq_itemsint or None

    When pretty-printing a long sequence, no more then max_seq_items will be printed. If items are omitted, they will be denoted by the addition of “…” to the resulting string.

    If set to None, the number of items to be printed is unlimited. [default: 100] [currently: 100]

  display.memory_usagebool, string or None

    This specifies if the memory usage of a DataFrame should be displayed when df.info() is called. Valid values True,False,’deep’ [default: True] [currently: True]

  display.min_rowsint

    The numbers of rows to show in a truncated view (when max_rows is exceeded). Ignored when max_rows is set to None or 0. When set to None, follows the value of max_rows. [default: 10] [currently: 10]

  display.multi_sparseboolean

    “sparsify” MultiIndex display (don’t display repeated elements in outer levels within groups) [default: True] [currently: True]

  display.notebook_repr_htmlboolean

    When True, IPython notebook will use html representation for pandas objects (if it is available). [default: True] [currently: True]

  display.pprint_nest_depthint

    Controls the number of nested levels to process when pretty-printing [default: 3] [currently: 3]

  display.precisionint

    Floating point output precision in terms of number of places after the decimal, for regular formatting as well as scientific notation. Similar to `precision` in `numpy.set_printoptions()`. [default: 6] [currently: 6]

  display.show_dimensionsboolean or ‘truncate’

    Whether to print out dimensions at the end of DataFrame repr. If ‘truncate’ is specified, only print out the dimensions if the frame is truncated (e.g. not display all rows and/or columns) [default: truncate] [currently: truncate]

  display.unicode.ambiguous_as_wideboolean

    Whether to use the Unicode East Asian Width to calculate the display text width. Enabling this may affect to the performance (default: False) [default: False] [currently: False]

  display.unicode.east_asian_widthboolean

    Whether to use the Unicode East Asian Width to calculate the display text width. Enabling this may affect to the performance (default: False) [default: False] [currently: False]

  display.widthint

    Width of the display in characters. In case python/IPython is running in a terminal this can be set to None and pandas will correctly auto-detect the width. Note that the IPython notebook, IPython qtconsole, or IDLE do not run in a terminal and hence it is not possible to correctly detect the width. [default: 80] [currently: 80]

  future.infer_string Whether to infer sequence of str objects as pyarrow string dtype, which will be the default in pandas 3.0 (at which point this option will be deprecated).

    [default: False] [currently: False]

  future.no_silent_downcasting Whether to opt-in to the future behavior which will not silently downcast results from Series and DataFrame where, mask, and clip methods. Silent downcasting will be removed in pandas 3.0 (at which point this option will be deprecated).

    [default: False] [currently: False]

  io.excel.ods.readerstring

    The default Excel reader engine for ‘ods’ files. Available options: auto, odf, calamine. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.ods.writerstring

    The default Excel writer engine for ‘ods’ files. Available options: auto, odf. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.xls.readerstring

    The default Excel reader engine for ‘xls’ files. Available options: auto, xlrd, calamine. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.xlsb.readerstring

    The default Excel reader engine for ‘xlsb’ files. Available options: auto, pyxlsb, calamine. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.xlsm.readerstring

    The default Excel reader engine for ‘xlsm’ files. Available options: auto, xlrd, openpyxl, calamine. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.xlsm.writerstring

    The default Excel writer engine for ‘xlsm’ files. Available options: auto, openpyxl. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.xlsx.readerstring

    The default Excel reader engine for ‘xlsx’ files. Available options: auto, xlrd, openpyxl, calamine. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.excel.xlsx.writerstring

    The default Excel writer engine for ‘xlsx’ files. Available options: auto, openpyxl, xlsxwriter. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.hdf.default_formatformat

    default format writing format, if None, then put will default to ‘fixed’ and append will default to ‘table’ [default: None] [currently: None]

  io.hdf.dropna_tableboolean

    drop ALL nan rows when appending to a table [default: False] [currently: False]

  io.parquet.enginestring

    The default parquet reader/writer engine. Available options: ‘auto’, ‘pyarrow’, ‘fastparquet’, the default is ‘auto’ [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  io.sql.enginestring

    The default sql reader/writer engine. Available options: ‘auto’, ‘sqlalchemy’, the default is ‘auto’ [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  mode.chained_assignmentstring

    Raise an exception, warn, or no action if trying to use chained assignment, The default is warn [default: warn] [currently: warn]

  mode.copy_on_writebool

    Use new copy-view behaviour using Copy-on-Write. Defaults to False, unless overridden by the ‘PANDAS_COPY_ON_WRITE’ environment variable (if set to “1” for True, needs to be set before pandas is imported). [default: False] [currently: False]

  mode.data_managerstring

    Internal data manager type; can be “block” or “array”. Defaults to “block”, unless overridden by the ‘PANDAS_DATA_MANAGER’ environment variable (needs to be set before pandas is imported). [default: block] [currently: block] (Deprecated, use `` instead.)

  mode.sim_interactiveboolean

    Whether to simulate interactive mode for purposes of testing [default: False] [currently: False]

  mode.string_storagestring

    The default storage for StringDtype. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  mode.use_inf_as_naboolean

    True means treat None, NaN, INF, -INF as NA (old way), False means None and NaN are null, but INF, -INF are not NA (new way).

    This option is deprecated in pandas 2.1.0 and will be removed in 3.0. [default: False] [currently: False] (Deprecated, use `` instead.)

  plotting.backendstr

    The plotting backend to use. The default value is “matplotlib”, the backend provided with pandas. Other backends can be specified by providing the name of the module that implements the backend. [default: matplotlib] [currently: matplotlib]

  plotting.matplotlib.register_convertersbool or ‘auto’.

    Whether to register converters with matplotlib’s units registry for dates, times, datetimes, and Periods. Toggling to False will remove the converters, restoring any converters that pandas overwrote. [default: auto] [currently: auto]

  styler.format.decimalstr

    The character representation for the decimal separator for floats and complex. [default: .] [currently: .]

  styler.format.escapestr, optional

    Whether to escape certain characters according to the given context; html or latex. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.format.formatterstr, callable, dict, optional

    A formatter object to be used as default within `Styler.format`. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.format.na_repstr, optional

    The string representation for values identified as missing. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.format.precisionint

    The precision for floats and complex numbers. [default: 6] [currently: 6]

  styler.format.thousandsstr, optional

    The character representation for thousands separator for floats, int and complex. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.html.mathjaxbool

    If False will render special CSS classes to table attributes that indicate Mathjax will not be used in Jupyter Notebook. [default: True] [currently: True]

  styler.latex.environmentstr

    The environment to replace `\begin{table}`. If “longtable” is used results in a specific longtable environment format. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.latex.hrulesbool

    Whether to add horizontal rules on top and bottom and below the headers. [default: False] [currently: False]

  styler.latex.multicol_align{“r”, “c”, “l”, “naive-l”, “naive-r”}

    The specifier for horizontal alignment of sparsified LaTeX multicolumns. Pipe decorators can also be added to non-naive values to draw vertical rules, e.g. “|r” will draw a rule on the left side of right aligned merged cells. [default: r] [currently: r]

  styler.latex.multirow_align{“c”, “t”, “b”}

    The specifier for vertical alignment of sparsified LaTeX multirows. [default: c] [currently: c]

  styler.render.encodingstr

    The encoding used for output HTML and LaTeX files. [default: utf-8] [currently: utf-8]

  styler.render.max_columnsint, optional

    The maximum number of columns that will be rendered. May still be reduced to satisfy `max_elements`, which takes precedence. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.render.max_elementsint

    The maximum number of data-cell (<td>) elements that will be rendered before trimming will occur over columns, rows or both if needed. [default: 262144] [currently: 262144]

  styler.render.max_rowsint, optional

    The maximum number of rows that will be rendered. May still be reduced to satisfy `max_elements`, which takes precedence. [default: None] [currently: None]

  styler.render.reprstr

    Determine which output to use in Jupyter Notebook in {“html”, “latex”}. [default: html] [currently: html]

  styler.sparse.columnsbool

    Whether to sparsify the display of hierarchical columns. Setting to False will display each explicit level element in a hierarchical key for each column. [default: True] [currently: True]

  styler.sparse.indexbool

    Whether to sparsify the display of a hierarchical index. Setting to False will display each explicit level element in a hierarchical key for each row. [default: True] [currently: True]

  Examples

      >>> pd.describe_option('display.max_columns')
      display.max_columns : int
          If max_cols is exceeded, switch to truncate view...