From the docs for c it is used to

Combine Values into a Vector or List

In python you can combine values into a list using brackets so c(1, 2, 3) in R become [1, 2, 3] in Python. But if you didn't know this, I really urge you to stop porting the code and take two days to go through a basic Python tutorial. Understanding lists in Python is about as basic as you get.

The docs for tabulate state

tabulate takes the integer-valued vector bin and counts the number of times each integer occurs in it.

this sounds just like numpy's bincount

Count number of occurrences of each value in array of non-negative ints.

unless you have a requirement to also count negative ints? If not, it's pretty much a drop in replacement. So tabulate(c(2,3,3,5), nbins = 10) becomes np.bincount(np.array([2, 3, 3, 5]), minlength=10)

It's not really hard to roll your own formatting function:

def print_table(table):
    col_width = [max(len(x) for x in col) for col in zip(*table)]
    for line in table:
        print "| " + " | ".join("{:{}}".format(x, col_width[i])
                                for i, x in enumerate(line)) + " |"

table = [(str(x), str(f(x))) for x in mylist]
print_table(table)

There are some light and useful python packages for this purpose:

1. tabulate

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tabulate

from tabulate import tabulate
print(tabulate([['Alice', 24], ['Bob', 19]], headers=['Name', 'Age']))

Name      Age
------  -----
Alice      24
Bob        19

tabulate has many options to specify headers and table format.

print(tabulate(
    [['Alice', 24], ['Bob', 19]],
    headers=['Name', 'Age'],
    tablefmt='orgtbl'))

| Name   |   Age |
|--------+-------|
| Alice  |    24 |
| Bob    |    19 |

2. PrettyTable

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PrettyTable

from prettytable import PrettyTable
t = PrettyTable(['Name', 'Age'])
t.add_row(['Alice', 24])
t.add_row(['Bob', 19])
print(t)

+-------+-----+
|  Name | Age |
+-------+-----+
| Alice |  24 |
|  Bob  |  19 |
+-------+-----+

PrettyTable has options to read data from csv, html, sql database. Also you are able to select subset of data, sort table and change table styles.

3. texttable

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/texttable

from texttable import Texttable
t = Texttable()
t.add_rows([['Name', 'Age'], ['Alice', 24], ['Bob', 19]])
print(t.draw())

+-------+-----+
| Name  | Age |
+=======+=====+
| Alice | 24  |
+-------+-----+
| Bob   | 19  |
+-------+-----+

with texttable you can control horizontal/vertical align, border style and data types.

4. termtables

https://github.com/nschloe/termtables

import termtables as tt

string = tt.to_string(
    [["Alice", 24], ["Bob", 19]],
    header=["Name", "Age"],
    style=tt.styles.ascii_thin_double,
    # alignment="ll",
    # padding=(0, 1),
)
print(string)

+-------+-----+
| Name  | Age |
+=======+=====+
| Alice | 24  |
+-------+-----+
| Bob   | 19  |
+-------+-----+

with texttable you can control horizontal/vertical align, border style and data types.

Other options

• terminaltables - Easily draw tables in terminal/console applications from a list of lists of strings. Supports multi-line rows.
• asciitable can read and write a wide range of ASCII table formats via built-in Extension Reader Classes.

A slightly more readable version:

def tabulate(words, termwidth=79, pad=3):
    width = len(max(words, key=len)) + pad
    ncols = max(1, termwidth // width)
    nrows = (len(words) - 1) // ncols + 1
    table = []
    for i in xrange(nrows):
        row = words[i::nrows]
        format_str = ('%%-%ds' % width) * len(row)
        table.append(format_str % tuple(row))
    return '\n'.join(table)

Most notably, I've defined width to include padding and using string formatting to generate a format string to format each row ;).

I seem to be having good output with prettytable:

from prettytable import PrettyTable
x = PrettyTable(dat.dtype.names)
for row in dat:
    x.add_row(row)
# Change some column alignments; default was 'c'
x.align['column_one'] = 'r'
x.align['col_two'] = 'r'
x.align['column_3'] = 'l'

And the output is not bad. There is even a border switch, among a few other options:

>>> print(x)
+------------+---------+-------------+
| column_one | col_two | column_3    |
+------------+---------+-------------+
|          0 |  0.0001 | ABCD        |
|          1 |   1e-05 | ABCD        |
|          2 |   1e-06 | long string |
|          3 |   1e-07 | ABCD        |
+------------+---------+-------------+
>>> print(x.get_string(border=False))
 column_one  col_two  column_3  
          0   0.0001  ABCD        
          1    1e-05  ABCD        
          2    1e-06  long string 
          3    1e-07  ABCD