Tab Delimited Strings?

[johnywhy]

the following tab-delimits each item

print ("a", "b")
a	b

Is there an equally simple way to build a tab-delimited string, aside from print?

The following creates a tuple, but not a tab-delimited string

myString = ("a", "b")
print (myString)
('a', 'b')

I think i could join with tab char, but that seems clunky and inefficient. I noticed, in my case, i need double-parens so that join sees a single argument.

delimited = "\t".join((str(idx), choice, '\n'))

A for loop seem even more inefficient.

Maybe f strings? Or format method or function?

[deanhystad]

The print statement defaults to a single space as a delimiter, not a tab. You can set the seperator using the sep="\t" in the print command

Look at str.join(). It does what I think you are asking.

[johnywhy]

Look at str.join(). It does what I think you are asking.

Can this be simplified with f or format or any other way?

delimited = "\t".join((str(idx), choice, '\n'))

[sgrey]

Look at str.join(). It does what I think you are asking.

Can this be simplified with f or format or any other way?

delimited = "\t".join((str(idx), choice, '\n'))

what is your actual use case? Do you need to print out elements of lists/tuples of arbitrary length or do you always have only 2 elements? Depending on what you are writing, you can just use format string like print(f"{idx[0]}\t{idx[1]}\n")
If you need something more complex, you can define your own __str__ method in a data class and just print that.

[johnywhy]

what is your actual use case? Do you need to print out elements of lists/tuples of arbitrary length or do you always have only 2 elements?

Always 2 elements followed by newline.

Depending on what you are writing, you can just use format string like print(f"{idx[0]}\t{idx[1]}\n")

I'm just trying to assemble the string here, not print it. How to do that with f?
My terms are just str(idx) and choice, with a trailing newline.

you can define your own __str__ method in a data class.

I'd like to learn how, but sounds even more complicated.

[sgrey]

I'm just trying to assemble the string here, not print it. How to do that with f?
My terms are just str(idx) and choice, with a trailing newline.

You are just writing out elements of a tuple manually and you can directly use that string without a print statement. You can either just do something like

t = ('a', 'b')
myString = f"{t[0]}\t{t[1]}\n"

which does look busy, but in reality is a simple statement.
Or if you need to do it in many places in your code, define a function that will return this formatted string from your tuple and just call it.

I'd like to learn how, but sounds even more complicated.

If you need custom data behavior, you can define a class for your data. In python if you place __str__ method in your class, you can then directly put an instance of that class in a print statement and it will invoke this method to print what you define in it.

[johnywhy]

Thanks. I can see how putting the items into a tuple first would help in some cases, but i think it doesn't give much benefit here. Your f statement doesn't use the entire tuple t, it uses each element individually. So you're putting things into a tuple, and then taking them out again.

Your f statement is less to type than my join, which is good.

# join
myString = "\t".join((str(idx), choice, '\n'))

# f
myString = f"{str(idx)}\t{choice}\n"

Would the f statement execute faster on a large set? (i don't mean more elements, i mean more rows with these same 2 elements per row)

One thing i don't like is that i can't embed spaces in the f statement for visual clarity, because the spaces would become part of the string.

myString = f" {str(idx)} \t {choice} \n"

[sgrey]

you don't need to call str on a variable inside string format, so you would write it as myString = f"{idx}\t{choice}\n"
And you are correct, string format of that kind is not the most readable. There is not much you can do about it as far as I know. The best solution probably would be a custom object that will deal with formatting internally and provide you a good interface.

And as far as performance go, it will vary which one is faster, join or string formatting. In this case formatting probably will be a bit faster.