Cfrtjryk

I'm new to Python and I came to the following excercise:

Write a function named printTable() that takes a list of lists of
strings and displays it in a well-organized table with each column
right-justified. Assume that all the inner lists will contain the same
number of strings. For example, the value could look like this:

tableData = [['apples', 'oranges', 'cherries', 'banana'],

             ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carol', 'David'],

             ['dogs', 'cats', 'moose', 'goose']]

Your printTable() function would print the following:

  apples Alice  dogs

 oranges   Bob  cats

cherries Carol moose

  banana David goose

My solution is this:

table_printer.py

tableData = [['apples', 'oranges', 'cherries', 'banana'],

             ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carol', 'David'],

             ['dogs', 'cats', 'moose', 'goose']]



def printTable(tableData):

    """

    Print table neatly formatted:

    e.g:



    [['apples', 'oranges', 'cherries', 'banana'],

    ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carol', 'David'],

    ['dogs', 'cats', 'moose', 'goose']]



    becomes:



      apples Alice  dogs

     oranges   Bob  cats

    cherries Carol moose

      banana David goose

    """

    # make list of ints to store later max len element of each list

    colWidths = [0] * len(tableData)



    # Store maxlen of each list

    i = 0

    while i < len(tableData):

        colWidths[i] = len(max(tableData[i], key=len))

        i = i + 1



    # Print formatted

    for x in range(len(tableData[0])):

        for y in range(len(colWidths)):

            print(tableData[y][x].rjust(colWidths[y]), end=' ')

        print(end='n')



printTable(tableData)

I wonder if this is a good solution or if there is an easier/better way. It took me quite some time to come up with a solution. Still I feel its probaly not very elegant. Maybe I'm overcomplicating it because I came from C/C++ where you oftenly have to do stuff by hand.

I read that it's often not a good idea in python to write loops like in other languages with explicit indices (what I basically did here). Are there any alternatives?

Here is my proposal. It is shorter than OP's solution, specially to compute the length of each word to be used in the format procedure while printing.

In a single line, we obtain a 1D array with maximal lengths.

import numpy as np



tableData = [['apples', 'oranges', 'cherries', 'banana'],

             ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carol', 'David'],

             ['dogs', 'cats', 'moose', 'goose']]



max_len = np.array([np.array(max([len(xii) for xii in xi])) for xi in tableData])



for col in range(len(tableData[0])):

    for i in range(len(tableData)):

        print ("{:>%d}" % max_len[i]).format(tableData[i][col]),

    print ""

Output

  apples Alice  dogs 

 oranges   Bob  cats 

cherries Carol moose 

  banana David goose