I do this a lot in Perl:
printf "%8s %8s %8s\n", qw(date price ret);
However, the best I can come up with in Python is
print '%8s %8s %8s' % (tuple("date price ret".split()))
I'm just wondering if there is a more elegant way of doing it? I'm fine if you tell me that's it and no improvement can be made.
Well, there's definitely no way to do exactly what you can do in Perl, because Python will complain about undefined variable names and a syntax error (missing comma, perhaps). But I would write it like this (in Python 2.X):
print '%8s %8s %8s' % ('date', 'price', 'ret')
If you're really attached to Perl's syntax, I guess you could define a function qw like this:
def qw(s):
return tuple(s.split())
and then you could write
print '%8s %8s %8s' % qw('date price ret')
which is basically Perl-like except for the one pair of quotes on the argument to qw. But I'd hesitate to recommend that. At least, don't do it only because you miss Perl - it only enables your denial that you're working in a new programming language now ;-) It's like the old story about Pascal programmers who switch to C and create macros
#define BEGIN {
#define END }