Nsryjdtyk

im new two 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 there is a easier/better way. It took me quite some time to come up with a solution. Still i feel its probaly not very elegant.
Maybe im thinking to difficult because i come from c/c++ were you often have to do more stuff by hand.

I read is 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?

Here is my proposal.

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