Parsing data from bash table with empty fields

I am currently trying to parse some data from bash tables, and I found strange behavior in parsing data if some columns is empty for example

i have data like this

containerName    ipAddress          memoryMB  name       numberOfCpus  status
---------------  ---------------  ----------  -------  --------------  ----------
TEST_VM          192.168.150.111        8192  TEST_VM               4  POWERED_ON

and sometimes like this

containerName    ipAddress      memoryMB  name                      numberOfCpus  status
---------------  -----------  ----------  ----------------------  --------------  -----------
TEST_VM_second                      3072  TEST_VM_second_renamed               1  POWERED_OFF

I tried with python and with bash, but same results, I need data "name" but when I am using bash
for example awk ‘{print $4}’ in first table it prints expected result:

name
-------
TEST_VM

but in second table in prints:

name
----------------------
1

same results with python:

df_info = pd.read_table(StringIO(table), delim_whitespace=True)
df_info = df_info.drop(0)
pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', None)
print(df_info['name'], df_info['containerName'])

Output:

1    TEST_VM
Name: name, dtype: object 1    TEST_VM
Name: containerName, dtype: object

1    1
Name: name, dtype: object 1    TEST_VM_second
Name: containerName, dtype: object

Maybe someone knows how to play around if ipaddress is empty field ?

>Solution :

Don’t parse the file manually, take advantage of pandas.read_fwf:

df_info = pd.read_fwf(StringIO(table), skiprows=[1], delim_whitespace=True)
df_info.columns = df_info.columns.str.strip()

Output:

    containerName    ipAddre  memoryMB                    name  numberOfCpu         tatu
0  TEST_VM_second                 3072  TEST_VM_second_renamed            1  POWERED_OFF