Opening fixed-width files

You can use pd.read_fwf to open fixed-width files in pandas, but there are a lot of different options to pass it and it gets overwhelming quickly. I find that using widths is usually easiest.

Example

Let’s say we have a file of medieval jobs:

name     title              salary
Ryxlar   Chief Dragon Slayer20000 
Tiqla    Assistant Alchemist4000  
Brynz    Brute Squad        1000  
Mr PotatoMess Cook          35000 

Usually the documentation lists the start and end of each column, but the whole half-open interval thing is tough to work with, so just compute the width of each. You can even count the spaces if you have to!

Then you just make a well-commented list and send it to read_fwf.

widths = [
    9, #name
    19, #title
    6, #salary
]
df = pd.read_fwf("fixed_width.txt", widths=widths)
df

And there you go!