Python 3 - Printing table using three lists

Question

I am quite new to Python and I am now struggling with formatting my data nicely for printed output.

I have three lists:

list1 = [a, b, c, a, b, c, a,  b, c]
list2 = [day1, day2, day3]
list3 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Now, I want to represent this in a table format, something like this:

------------+--------+-------+-------+
|    User    |  day1  | day2  | day3  | 
+============+========+=======+=======+
|a           |  1     |  2    |   3   |
+------------+--------+-------+-------+
| b          | 4      | 5     |   6   |
+----- ------+--- ----+-------+ ------+
|c           |  7     | 8     | 9     |

I have tired different modules like texttable and also tried to use For loop combinations. but still i cannot catch right combination.

Answer 1

I have used prettyTable in the past and it is quite efficient in accomplishing this task. PrettyTable link

Update:

Please see this stackoverflow question for more details as well - How to use PrettyTable

Sample code (copied from the following link) tries to show what it does (although it uses a package that has been forked from PrettyTable, but I believe the usage remains the same).

#!/usr/bin/python3

from prettytable import PrettyTable

x = PrettyTable()

x.field_names = ["City name", "Area", "Population", "Annual Rainfall"]

x.add_row(["Adelaide", 1295, 1158259, 600.5])
x.add_row(["Brisbane", 5905, 1857594, 1146.4])
x.add_row(["Darwin", 112, 120900, 1714.7])
x.add_row(["Hobart", 1357, 205556, 619.5])
x.add_row(["Sydney", 2058, 4336374, 1214.8])
x.add_row(["Melbourne", 1566, 3806092, 646.9])
x.add_row(["Perth", 5386, 1554769, 869.4])

print(x)

This is a very simple answer. However it does show how easy it is to setup and use it.

Thanks.

Answer 2

Astropy has a nice asciitables library that appears to solve this.

http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/io/ascii/index.html

python-tabulate also appears to try to solve this:

https://bitbucket.org/astanin/python-tabulate

But Pandas is the default python library for tabular data as far as I know. Look how pretty your tables can be in a Jupyter notebook!

To make a dataframe out of your lists you could just do the following with pandas installed:

import pandas a pd
list1 = [a, b, c, a, b, c, a,  b, c]
list2 = [day1, day2, day3]
list3 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

df = pd.DataFrame({
    "list1": list1,
    "list2": list2,
    "list3": list3,
})