BUG: to_string(header=False) should not shift the index w.r.t. the data

[jondo]

Pandas version checks

• I have checked that this issue has not already been reported.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the latest version of pandas.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.

Reproducible Example

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([2,3])
df.index.name = 'a'
print(df.to_string(header=False))

Issue Description

The code results in

a  2
0  3
1 

Expected Behavior

a   
0  2
1  3

Installed Versions

pd.show_versions() yields:

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : 91111fd
python : 3.9.2.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Linux
OS-release : 5.10.0-17-amd64
Version : #1 SMP Debian 5.10.136-1 (2022-08-13)
machine : x86_64
processor :
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : en_DK.UTF-8
LOCALE : en_DK.UTF-8

pandas : 1.5.1
numpy : 1.23.3
pytz : 2022.4
dateutil : 2.8.2
setuptools : 44.1.1
pip : 22.2.2
Cython : None
pytest : None
hypothesis : None
sphinx : None
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : None
lxml.etree : None
html5lib : None
pymysql : None
psycopg2 : None
jinja2 : None
IPython : 7.34.0
pandas_datareader: None
bs4 : None
bottleneck : None
brotli : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : None
gcsfs : None
matplotlib : 3.6.1
numba : None
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : 3.0.10
pandas_gbq : None
pyarrow : None
pyreadstat : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : None
snappy : None
sqlalchemy : None
tables : None
tabulate : None
xarray : None
xlrd : None
xlwt : None
zstandard : None
tzdata : None

[jondo]

Workaround: reset df.index.name to None before calling df.to_string.

[vamsi-verma-s]

use index_names=False

print(df.to_string(header=False, index_names=False))
0  2
1  3

[jondo]

@vamsi-verma-s, thank you for pointing out the index_names argument.

In my case df.to_string(header=False) evaluates to the string 'a 2\n0 3\n1 ', which nonsensically has the index name and the first value of the data column in the same row, and the rest of the index shifted w.r.t the data.

I now updated my report: I expect df.to_string(header=False) to give 'a \n0 2\n1 3', analogous to the ' 0\na \n0 2\n1 3' of df.to_string()`.

[andrewchen1216]

take

[attack68]

Note that Styler.to_string is also a workaround

>>> print(df.style.hide(axis="columns").to_string())
a 
0 2
1 3

>>> print(df.style.hide(axis="columns").hide(axis="index", names=True).to_string())
0 2
1 3