How do I print this list vertically?

Question

Let\'s say I have this list of asterisks, and I say it to print this way:

list = [\'* *\', \'*\', \'* * *\', \'* * * * *\', \'* * * * * *\', \'* * * *\']
for         


        

Answer 1

If you don't want to import itertools, you can do it like this:

ell = ['* *', '*', '* * *', '* * * * *', '* * * * * *', '* * * *']
unpadded_ell = [s.replace(' ', '') for s in ell]
height = len(max(unpadded_ell))
for s in zip(*(s.ljust(height) for s in unpadded_ell)):
    print(' '.join(s))

Note a couple of things:

1. I have renamed the list to ell, since list is a built-in word in python.
2. This works by expanding the strings so that they all have the same length by padding them with spaces, then converting the list of strings into a list of lists representing a rectangular matrix.
3. I have used the trick described in this post to do a matrix transpose, which is what you want to print. It uses zip, which is a builtin function for "combining" iterables like lists.
4. I also used a couple of comprehensions to keep things short.
5. This works in python 2 and 3. If you want it to look more like python 2, take out the parentheses used for the print function.