Using str to return a variable number of different lined strings?

I'm working on a project that creates "Facebook" in Python 3.x. The part I am currently stuck on is using the str function to return strings on different lines.

The code I am using for this is:

class Status:
    likers = []
    commentObjs = []
    def __init__(self, statusPoster, statusMsg, likers, commentObjs):
        self.statuser = statusPoster
        self.status = statusMsg
        self.likers = likers
        self.commentObjs = commentObjs

and

def __str__(self):
    return '%s: %s \n"hello"' %(self.statuser,self.status)

__repr__= __str__

The problem that I am running into is that there can be a variable number of likers and a variable number of commentObjs.

What would I have to implement to make it so if there is only one value such as:

likers = ["Spongebob"] 
commentObjs = ["Spongebob: You should watch the Spongebob movie!"]

It returns in the terminal:

Brad Pitt will watch a movie today!
Spongebob likes this.
Spongebob: You should watch The Spongebob movie!

But if there is more than one value in each list, such as:

likers = ["Spongebob","Harry Potter"] 
commentObjs = ["Spongebob: You should watch the Spongebob movie!","Brad Pitt: How about nah?"]

It returns:

Brad Pitt will watch a movie today!
Spongebob, Harry Potter likes this.
Spongebob: You should watch The Spongebob movie!
Brad Pitt: Nah, I will probably watch Mr and Mrs. Smith.

The only way I could think to possibly do this would be something with a for loop and len(likers), but I don't know how I would be able to do that while still returning the constant values of the name and status.

Solution

You are looking for str.join() here. This lets you join several strings with a joining string between (which can be empty):

>>> likers = ['Spongebob', 'Harry Potter']
>>> ', '.join(likers)
'Spongebob, Harry Potter'
>>> ' -> '.join(likers)
'Spongebob -> Harry Potter'

You probably also want to learn about str.format() to interpolate values into a template string:

def __str__(self):
    likers = ', '.join(self.likers)
    comments = '\n'.join(self.commentObjs)
    return '{} {}\n{} likes this.\n{}'.format(
        self.statuser, self.status, likers, comments)

This joins your likers value with commas, and the comments with newlines.

You should not use this as your __repr__; that should produce debugging output, helping you distinguish between two instances of your class, optionally with the contained values part of that output.

Using __str__ to return a variable number of different lined strings?

Using str to return a variable number of different lined strings?