Printing a list of lists, without brackets

Question

A somewhat similar question was asked on here but the answers did not help.

I have a list of lists, specifically something like..

[[tables, 1, 2], [ladders, 2, 5], [chairs, 2]]

It is meant to be a simple indexer.

I am meant to output it like thus:

tables 1, 2
ladders 2, 5
chairs 2

I can't get quite that output though.

I can however get:

tables 1 2
ladders 2 5
chairs 2

But that isn't quite close enough.

Is there a simple way to do what I'm asking? This is not meant to be the hard part of the program.

Solution 1

The following will do it:

for item in l:
  print item[0], ', '.join(map(str, item[1:]))

where l is your list.

For your input, this prints out

tables 1, 2
ladders 2, 5
chairs 2

Solution 2

If you don't mind that the output is on separate lines:

foo = [["tables", 1, 2], ["ladders", 2, 5], ["chairs", 2]]
for table in foo:
    print "%s %s" %(table[0],", ".join(map(str,table[1:])))

To get this all on the same line makes it slightly more difficult:

import sys
foo = [["tables", 1, 2], ["ladders", 2, 5], ["chairs", 2]]
for table in foo:
    sys.stdout.write("%s %s " %(table[0],", ".join(map(str,table[1:]))))

print

Solution 3

In Python 3.4.x

The following will do it:

for item in l:
    print(str(item[0:])[1:-1])

where l is your list.

For your input, this prints out:

tables 1, 2
ladders 2, 5
chairs 2

Another (cleaner) way would be something like this:

for item in l:
    value_set = str(item[0:])
    print (value_set[1:-1])

Yields the same output:

tables 1, 2
ladders 2, 5
chairs 2

Hope this helps anyone that may come across this issue.

Comments

[NPE]

@LarryLustig: As far as I can see, the output is exactly as the OP requested, down to spaces and commas.

[user1079404]

I just tried this with: [['wind', 1, 2], ['blow', 1], ['form', 1], ['south', 1], ['strong', 2]] I got output of: w i, n, d Followed by a traceback error about why an int is not subscriptable

[user1079404]

This pretty much makes sense, thank you for the explinations, but it also comes up with the same strange output that I responded to the first answer does. It will print something like: [['wind', 1, 2], ['blow', 1], ['form', 1], ['south', 1], ['strong', 2]] I got output of: w i, n, d Followed by a traceback error about why an int is not subscriptable

[NPE]

@user1079404: I've just tested the code on your list and it works. Make sure you're applying it to the entire list, not to each element.

[Larry Lustig]

@aix: My mistake, I was reading the actual, rather than desired, output.

[user1079404]

Sorry, I see what I was doing wrong. The code works fine, but, I don't understand is the way that "join" works, so it always adds the string (in this case ', ') on to the end of each string in the iteration?

[NPE]

@user1079404: It inserts the , between consecutive elements. See docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.join

[ovgolovin]

Also, it's possible to use end='' as a parameter in print function as of Python 3, or in Python 2 with adding from __future__ import print_function statement at the beginning.

[ovgolovin]

@user1079404 I don't uderstand what's wrong. The code works for me.

[user1079404]

Yup I get it now thanks. Had to look up the python docs for "map" too but that also makes sense. Thanks once again.

[jordanm]

from __future__ import print_function appears to be available in 2.6, but not 2.4.