How to join list in Python but make the last separator different?

Question

I\'m trying to turn a list into separated strings joined with an ampersand if there are only two items, or commas and an ampersand between the last two e.g.

Answer 1

One liner. Just concatenate all but the last element with , as the delimiter. Then just append & and then the last element finally to the end.

print ', '.join(lst[:-1]) + ' & ' + lst[-1]

If you wish to handle empty lists or such:

if len(lst) > 1:
    print ', '.join(lst[:-1]) + ' & ' + lst[-1]
elif len(lst) == 1:
    print lst[0]

Answer 2

You can simply use Indexng and F-strings (Python-3.6+):

In [1]: l=['Jim','Dave','James','Laura','Kasra']                                                                                                                                                            

In [3]: ', '.join(l[:-1]) + f' & {l[-1]}'                                                                                                                                                                      

Out[3]: 'Jim, Dave, James, Laura & Kasra'