one two value value in some casesa table might not have fixed delimiterusing whitespace or some other pattern to separate fields in these casesyou can pass regular expression as delimiter for read_table consider text file that looks like thisin [ ]list(open('ch /ex txt')out[ ][ \ ''aaa - - - \ ''bbb - \ ''ccc - - - \ ''ddd - - \ 'while you could do some munging by handin this case fields are separated by variable amount of whitespace this can be expressed by the regular expression \ +so we have thenin [ ]result pd read_table('ch /ex txt'sep='\ +'in [ ]result out[ ] aaa - - - bbb - ccc - - - ddd - - because there was one fewer column name than the number of data rowsread_table infers that the first column should be the dataframe' index in this special case the parser functions have many additional arguments to help you handle the wide variety of exception file formats that occur (see table - for exampleyou can skip the firstthirdand fourth rows of file with skiprowsin [ ]!cat ch /ex csv heya, , , ,message just wanted to make things more difficult for you who reads csv files with computersanyway , , , ,hello , , , ,world , , , ,foo in [ ]pd read_csv('ch /ex csv'skiprows=[ ]out[ ] message data loadingstorageand file formats www it-ebooks info