TabLib: Pythonic Tabular Data Library

Looks like a nice little module.

However, just some comments on the (lack of) Pythonicity in this function:

    def is_string(obj):
        """Tests if an object is a string"""
        return True if type(obj).__name__ == 'str' else False

First, you don't need the "True if ... else False", because == is already a boolean operator which returns True or False.

Also, you don't need to look at the type's __name__. You can just say:

    type(obj) == str

But Python already has an isinstance() function which will also work properly with subclasses of str, so suddenly you don't need the is_string() helper function anymore, and it becomes:

    isinstance(obj, str)

(Though you should probably use "basestring" in Python 2.x so it works with Unicode keys too.)

This looks pretty interesting. We have a similar home-grown library at work with a lot more structure built into the headers. For example, a header can specify what datatype the column is (number, text, icon), as well as a title in various formats (html, text, spreadsheet). The basic idea is the same, though. Take a bunch of data, throw it in a container object, and export it in a bunch of different formats.