What Plain Text is
Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.
Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.
What Pandas DataFrame is
Python that builds a pandas DataFrame from a dictionary of columns.
Data analysis and notebooks.
What changes when you convert Plain Text to Pandas DataFrame
Two shapes are handled. If the same character positions are blank on every line, those gutters are treated as column boundaries, so values containing single spaces stay intact. Otherwise the lines are split on runs of whitespace.
The import line is included so the snippet runs as is. Turn type inference on and numeric columns arrive as numbers rather than strings, which is usually what you want in a DataFrame.
What carries over from Plain Text to Pandas DataFrame
pandas can express everything plain text holds about a table, so this conversion is about shape rather than loss.
pandas wants a type for each column, and plain text does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
pandas marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Pandas DataFrame as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a Pandas DataFrame file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the Pandas DataFrame.