Description
Currently the DataFrame.Styler class provides for adding of css key/value attribute pairs. But it is sometimes preferable to add a HTML class to a cell instead, and then let the styling be done by an external css file.
As an example consider the following DataFrame:
df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2],
[-5,1]],
columns=['A','B'])
As an example, we would like to attach the class "negative" to the -5 and receive the following HTML:
<html><table border="1" class="dataframe">
<thead>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<th></th>
<th>A</th>
<th>B</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>0</th>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>1</th>
<td class="negative">-5</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></html>
Regarding how to implement this, here are a couple of ideas:
- Add a flag
by_classtoapply()andapplymap()that instructs the styler that the "function" will return a classes instead of css strings. - Add new functions apply_class() and applymap_class().
- Create a new class StyleClass() and use
isinstance(ret,StyleClass)to determine whether to modify the style directly or by adding additional classes.
IMO, I believe that it would be a better interface of styler that apply and applymap were to return classes by default and then optionally provide a css style sheet that can be resolved when turning the style into html. Such an approach would also be easier to adapt to additional backends, e.g. LaTeX. The disadvantage though is that it would break backwards compatibility, and that it would make styling for iPython (the main usecase?) more complicated.