1.1 Overview

pandas has an options system that lets you customize some aspects of its behaviour, display-related options being those the user is most likely to adjust.

Options have a full “dotted-style”, case-insensitive name (e.g. display.max_rows). You can get/set options directly as attributes of the top-level options attribute:

In [1]: import pandas as pd

In [2]: pd.options.display.max_rows
Out[2]: 15

In [3]: pd.options.display.max_rows = 999

In [4]: pd.options.display.max_rows
Out[4]: 999

There is also an API composed of 5 relevant functions, available directly from the pandas namespace:

get_option() / set_option() - get/set the value of a single option.
reset_option() - reset one or more options to their default value.
describe_option() - print the descriptions of one or more options.
option_context() - execute a codeblock with a set of options that revert to prior settings after execution.

Note: developers can check out pandas/core/config.py for more info.

All of the functions above accept a regexp pattern (re.search style) as an argument, and so passing in a substring will work - as long as it is unambiguous :

In [5]: pd.get_option("display.max_rows")
Out[5]: 999

In [6]: pd.set_option("display.max_rows",101)

In [7]: pd.get_option("display.max_rows")
Out[7]: 101

In [8]: pd.set_option("max_r",102)

In [9]: pd.get_option("display.max_rows")
Out[9]: 102

The following will not work because it matches multiple option names, e.g. display.max_colwidth, display.max_rows, display.max_columns:

In [10]: try:
   ....:     pd.get_option("column")
   ....: except KeyError as e:
   ....:     print(e)
   ....: 
'Pattern matched multiple keys'

Note: Using this form of shorthand may cause your code to break if new options with similar names are added in future versions.

You can get a list of available options and their descriptions with describe_option. When called with no argument describe_option will print out the descriptions for all available options.