Parse an orgmode table into a Pandas dataframe

parse_orgtable.py

def parse_orgtable(s):
    """Parse an org-table (input as a multiline string) into a Pandas data frame.""" 
    # This didn't quite work, because spaces messed things up
    #import cStringIO
    #table = pd.read_table(cStringIO.StringIO(s),sep='|',skiprows=[1],skipinitialspace=True)
    #table = table.drop(table.columns[[0,-1]],1)
    # I suppose I could have simply run strip() on all of the resulting column names, since that was the problem
    def parseline(l):
        w = l.split('|')[1:-1]
        return [wi.strip() for wi in w]
    lines = s.splitlines()
    columns = parseline(lines[0])

    data = []
    for line in lines[2:]:
        data.append(map(float,parseline(line)))
    return pd.DataFrame(data=data,columns=columns)