Print a list of space-separated elements in Python 3

Question

I have a list L of elements, say natural numbers. I want to print them in one line with a single space as a separator. But I don\'t w

Answer 1

list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
for i in list[0:-1]:
    print(i, end=', ')
print(list[-1])

do for loops really take that much longer to run?

was trying to make something that printed all str values in a list separated by commas, inserting "and" before the last entry and came up with this:

spam = ['apples', 'bananas', 'tofu', 'cats']
for i in spam[0:-1]:
    print(i, end=', ')
print('and ' + spam[-1])

Answer 2

Although the accepted answer is absolutely clear, I just wanted to check efficiency in terms of time.

The best way is to print joined string of numbers converted to strings.

print(" ".join(list(map(str,l))))

Note that I used map instead of loop. I wrote a little code of all 4 different ways to compare time:

import time as t

a, b = 10, 210000
l = list(range(a, b))
tic = t.time()
for i in l:
    print(i, end=" ")

print()
tac = t.time()
t1 = (tac - tic) * 1000
print(*l)
toe = t.time()
t2 = (toe - tac) * 1000
print(" ".join([str(i) for i in l]))
joe = t.time()
t3 = (joe - toe) * 1000
print(" ".join(list(map(str, l))))
toy = t.time()
t4 = (toy - joe) * 1000
print("Time",t1,t2,t3,t4)

Result:

Time 74344.76 71790.83 196.99 153.99

The output was quite surprising to me. Huge difference of time in cases of 'loop method' and 'joined-string method'.

Conclusion: Do not use loops for printing list if size is too large( in order of 10**5 or more).

Answer 3

You can apply the list as separate arguments:

print(*L)

and let print() take care of converting each element to a string. You can, as always, control the separator by setting the sep keyword argument:

>>> L = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> print(*L)
1 2 3 4 5
>>> print(*L, sep=', ')
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
>>> print(*L, sep=' -> ')
1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5

Unless you need the joined string for something else, this is the easiest method. Otherwise, use str.join():

joined_string = ' '.join([str(v) for v in L])
print(joined_string)
# do other things with joined_string

Note that this requires manual conversion to strings for any non-string values in L!

Answer 4

Joining elements in a list space separated:

word = ["test", "crust", "must", "fest"]
word.reverse()
joined_string = ""
for w in word:
   joined_string = w + joined_string + " "
print(joined_string.rstrim())