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.

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)