How to print a list more nicely?

Question

This is similar to How to print a list in Python “nicely”, but I would like to print the list even more nicely -- without the brackets and apostrophes and commas, and even b

Answer 1

Inspired by gimel's answer, above.

import math

def list_columns(obj, cols=4, columnwise=True, gap=4):
    """
    Print the given list in evenly-spaced columns.

    Parameters
    ----------
    obj : list
        The list to be printed.
    cols : int
        The number of columns in which the list should be printed.
    columnwise : bool, default=True
        If True, the items in the list will be printed column-wise.
        If False the items in the list will be printed row-wise.
    gap : int
        The number of spaces that should separate the longest column
        item/s from the next column. This is the effective spacing
        between columns based on the maximum len() of the list items.
    """

    sobj = [str(item) for item in obj]
    if cols > len(sobj): cols = len(sobj)
    max_len = max([len(item) for item in sobj])
    if columnwise: cols = int(math.ceil(float(len(sobj)) / float(cols)))
    plist = [sobj[i: i+cols] for i in range(0, len(sobj), cols)]
    if columnwise:
        if not len(plist[-1]) == cols:
            plist[-1].extend(['']*(len(sobj) - len(plist[-1])))
        plist = zip(*plist)
    printer = '\n'.join([
        ''.join([c.ljust(max_len + gap) for c in p])
        for p in plist])
    print printer

Results (the second one satisfies your request):

>>> list_columns(foolist)
exiv2-devel       fcgi              msvcrt            qgis-devel        
mingw-libs        netcdf            gdal-grass        qgis1.1           
tcltk-demos       pdcurses-devel    iconv             php_mapscript     

>>> list_columns(foolist, cols=2)
exiv2-devel       msvcrt            
mingw-libs        gdal-grass        
tcltk-demos       iconv             
fcgi              qgis-devel        
netcdf            qgis1.1           
pdcurses-devel    php_mapscript     

>>> list_columns(foolist, columnwise=False)
exiv2-devel       mingw-libs        tcltk-demos       fcgi              
netcdf            pdcurses-devel    msvcrt            gdal-grass        
iconv             qgis-devel        qgis1.1           php_mapscript     

>>> list_columns(foolist, gap=1)
exiv2-devel    fcgi           msvcrt         qgis-devel     
mingw-libs     netcdf         gdal-grass     qgis1.1        
tcltk-demos    pdcurses-devel iconv          php_mapscript