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pythonlistprintingoutputtabulate

how to print tab separated values of a python list of strings specifying a maximum line length and avoiding string break

I am trying to write a function that takes dir(obj) as argument and prints out a perfect list of string tabbed in multiple columns. dir(obj) is a function that generates a list of strings where each string is a method available for the chosen obj. The output, however, is formatted as a single column. I would like to generate tabbed columns instead.

So far I managed to use

lst = dir(str) # naming the variable as lst and trying it out with 'str' object    
print(*lst, sep='         \t') # note the amount of white spaces before \t

However, no matter how many times I tried separating them with different quantities of white space (sep=' \t'), the columns always break at some point. Please see below a screen clip from my Jupyter notebook:

screen clip from Jupyter notebook

I've spend the whole afternoon trying different alternatives, including pprint, columnar and tabulate, but these modules seem to work better with tables. Thus far I have not found a simpler and obvious way to do such a simple and obvious task. what am I missing here, please?

Solution 
  • longest = max([len(l) for l in lst])
cols = 5
padding = 5

for i, a in enumerate(lst):
    print(a, end=" "*(longest-len(a)+padding) if (i+1) % cols else "\n")

    will produce a result that looks like this

    " "*(longest-len(a)+padding) will adjust the columns for the longest variable and add some extra padding.