Question

I am a bit new to Python, having dabbled in VB.NET, C, and a few other odd languages, so I am finding the approaches used before don’t always apply to Python. In this case, I want to print out a series of integer values into columns and center them in as small amount of code as possible.

With plain strings, this is easy as:

print "%s|%s|%s|%s"   \
      % (s1.center(w), s2.center(x), s3.center(y), s4.center(z))

Where w through z is some integer value specifying the width of the field that the strings, s1 through s4, should be center in.

Doing the same with numbers when I want to use format specifiers like %0.2x or %4d won’t work because integers don’t have a center function.

Using a more C-oriented approach, I could convert each integer independently:

s1 = str("%0.4x" % (i)).center(w)
s2 = str("%0.2x" % (i)).center(x)
s3 = str("%0.2x" % (i)).center(y)
s4 = str("%0.8x" % (i)).center(z)
print "%s|%s|%s|%s" % (s1, s2, s3, s4)

But that seems to be “unpythonic”, if I am picking up the lingo correctly. What would be a good “pythonic” way to do this? It needs to be something that works with Python 2.4 and 2.7 (I am working in both environments).

Thanks!

Answer 1

ints = [1, 2, 3, 4]
widths = [(4, w), (2, x), (2, y), (8, z)]
for i in ints:
    print "%s|%s|%s|%s" % tuple(((("%0." + str(padding) + "d") % (i)).center(width)) for padding, width in widths)

Each tuple in widths is (padding, width), where each padding associated with a width is used in the string formatting "%0.[padding]d".