# xan bins ```txt Discretize selection of columns containing continuous data into bins. The resulting bins table will be formatted thusly: field - Name of the column value - Bin's label (depends on what was given to -l/--label) lower_bound - Lower bound of the bin upper_bound - Upper bound of the bin count - Number of rows falling into this bin The number of bins can be chosen with the -b/--bins flag. Note that, by default, this number is an approximate goal since the command attempts to find readble boundaries for the bins and this make it hard to respect a precise number of bins. Use the -e/--exact flag if you want to force the command to respect -b/--bins exactly. Combined with `xan hist`, this command can be very useful to visualize distributions of continous columns: $ xan bins -s count data.csv | xan hist Using a log scale: $ xan bins -s count data.csv | xan hist --scale log Usage: xan bins [options] [] xan bins --help bins options: -s, --select Select a subset of columns to compute bins for. See 'xan select --help' for more detail. -b, --bins Number of bins to generate. Note that without -e/--exact, this number should be considered as an approximate goal. The command by default attempts to find nice & readable boundaries for the bins and this means a precise number of bins is not always achievable. [default: 10] -H, --heuristic Heuristic to use to automatically find an adequate number of bins. Must be one of `freedman-diaconis`, `sqrt` or `sturges`. --max-bins Maximum number of bins to generate. Only useful when using the -H/--heuristic flag. -e, --exact Whether to make sure to return the exact number of bins provided to -b/--bins, which means the readability of the bins boundaries might suffer. -l, --label Label to choose for the bins (that will be placed in the `value` column). Mostly useful to tweak representation when piping to `xan hist`. Can be one of "full", "lower" or "upper". [default: full] -m, --min Override min value. Values lower that this min will be counted as out of bounds. -M, --max Override max value. Values greater that this max will be counted as out of bounds. -N, --no-extra Don't include, empty cells, nans and out of bounds counts. Common options: -h, --help Display this message -o, --output Write output to instead of stdout. -n, --no-headers When set, the file will be considered as having no headers. -d, --delimiter The field delimiter for reading CSV data. Must be a single character. ```