Python BigQuery API - get table schema

An alternative is, after you have your client and table instances, to do something like this:

import io
f = io.StringIO("")
client.schema_to_json(table.schema, f)
print(f.getvalue())

You can always get the table.schema variable and iterate over it, since the table is a list made of SchemaField values:

result = ["{0} {1}".format(schema.name,schema.field_type) for schema in table.schema]

Result for that same dataset and table:

['word STRING', 'word_count INTEGER', 'corpus STRING', 'corpus_date INTEGER']

here, schema has been expired.