I’m having trouble writing the entries of a pandas dataframe to a stringbuffer. It’s

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Editorial Team

Asked: May 29, 20262026-05-29T10:41:37+00:00 2026-05-29T10:41:37+00:00

I’m having trouble writing the entries of a pandas dataframe to a stringbuffer.

It’s possible to initialize a dataframe by passing a stringbuffer to the read_csv function.

In [80]: buf = StringIO('a,b\n1,2\n')
In [81]: df = pandas.read_csv(buf)
In [82]: df
Out[82]: 
   a  b
0  1  2

To do the opposite is not straight forward as the DataFrame.to_csv function only accepts a string file path.

Is there any good reason for this behaviour? What’s the best way to serialize a pandas DataFrame without storing the contents on disk first?

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-05-29T10:41:38+00:00

Editorial Team

This is pretty much just an oversight / inconsistency. I created a GitHub issue here for it:

EDIT: Implemented this today so you can pass a StringIO to to_csv, in git master now and will be part of forthcoming 0.7.0 release

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