Can I pass a list to headers?

[qm64]

Summary: I want to pass a list of dicts as the data, and a list of keys for headers. I don't want to full list of keys in the data as headers, I want a shorter list, in a different order.

In the documentation:

The following tabular data types are supported:
...
dict of iterables (keys as columns)
...

The headers parameter requires either a special keyword (e.g., "keys"), or a dict of column keys. I already have a list of column keys. (In a bizarre complication, the code converts this dict of column keys to a list? But doesn't support a list of column keys directly? WTF?) [I agree, it's nice that the header dict is converted to a list for me.)

My header list is not always the full list of column keys, as the full data is collected first, then a decision is made on which columns to output.

A workaround is to convert my list of column keys to a dict, so the code can convert it back?

[qm64]

Hmmm...further complications...

headers=some_dict, but the keys are not limited to the keys or values in some_dict, they are in fact ALL of the keys present in the data! (Again, WTF?)

In this scenario, headers only provides a mapping from actual key names to output column names. If there is no matching key in the headers dict, the original key from the original data is used. ¯\(ツ)/¯

            elif isinstance(headers, dict):
                # a dict of headers for a list of dicts
                headers = [headers.get(k, k) for k in keys]
                headers = list(map(_text_type, headers))

So I also need to filter out key/value pairs that I don't want in the output.