How can I align every word from this list?

Question

I have a list of lists in a file:

[ [ \'aaaaa\', \'bbb\',\'ccccccccc\' ], [ \'aaaaa\', \'bbbbbb\',\'cccccc\' ], [ \'aaa\', \'bbb\',\'ccccccccc\' ] ]

Answer 1

Tested with Python2.7:

lst = [ [ 'aaaaa', 'bbb','ccccccccc' ], [ 'aaaaa', 'bbbbbb','cccccc' ], [ 'aaa', 'bbb','ccccccccc' ] ]

widths = [max(len(j) for j in i) for i in zip(*lst)]
s = ''.join('{{:<{}}}'.format(w+2) for w in widths)

for v in lst:
    print(s.format(*v))

Prints each column aligned to max width of string inside this column + 2 extra characters:

aaaaa  bbb     ccccccccc  
aaaaa  bbbbbb  cccccc     
aaa    bbb     ccccccccc  

Answer 2

my_list = [ [ 'aaaaa', 'bbb','ccccccccc' ], [ 'aaaaa', 'bbbbbb','cccccc' ], [ 'aaa', 'bbb','ccccccccc' ] ]

# max_lengths = [max(len(y) for y in x) for x in zip(*my_list)]
# Can do above and get max lengths for each a, b, c etc but let us just get one global max for a neater solution

max_length = max(max(inner_list) for inner_list in my_list)

with open(target, "w") as writer:
   for inner_list in my_list:
       l_justed = [x.ljust(max_length) for x in inner_list)
       writer.writeline("    ".join(l_justed))

ljust adds spaces at the end to make the string length as specified value