Is it possible to place escaped characters in a Streamlit text_area component?

[ihudson709]

Is it possible to place escaped characters in a Streamlit text_area component?

I would like to place escaped tabs “\t” into the text_area component so that I can copy and paste the text area content into an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has merged cells so the format must be [text, tab, text tab tab, text tab tab, text] for the content to be properly copied into the correct cells.

Or maybe theres a better way?

Thanks for your help,

[blackary]

If you copy code that has tabs in it, you should be able to split the text by tabs, and then grab the remaining items.

Something like this should work:

In [6]: text = "abc\tqrs\t\txyz\t\tbcd"
   ...: items = [item for item in text.split("\t") if item]
   ...: print(items)
   ...: 
['abc', 'qrs', 'xyz', 'bcd']

[arnaud]

Hey @ihudson709! Welcome to our forum!

Looks like your intuition should work. Meaning this:

st.text_area("Text", "oooo\taaaa\tbbb")

Does indeed give

Which can be copy pasted to Excel (or here a Google Sheet) and it should work seamlessly!

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Now, depending on your overall workflow, I wonder if there would be a cleaner way to transmit data from your app to Excel. If, by chance, you’re using Pandas, maybe worth giving a look at to_excel()?

[ihudson709]

Thanks blackary and arnaud. This works perfectly.