Question

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

I have one list that is used for two headings, and a matrix that should be the contents of the table. Like so:

teams_list = ["Man Utd", "Man City", "T Hotspur"]
data = np.array([[1, 2, 1],
                 [0, 1, 0],
                 [2, 4, 2]])

Note that the heading names are not necessarily the same lengths. The data entries are all integers, though.

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

	Man Utd	Man City	T Hotspur
Man Utd	1	0	0
Man City	1	1	0
T Hotspur	0	1	2

I have a hunch that there must be a data structure for this, but I cannot find it. I have tried using a dictionary and formatting the printing, I have tried for-loops with indentation and I have tried printing as strings.

I am sure there must be a very simple way to do this, but I am probably missing it due to lack of experience.

Answer 1

Some ad-hoc code:

row_format ="{:>15}" * (len(teams_list) + 1)
print(row_format.format("", *teams_list))
for team, row in zip(teams_list, data):
    print(row_format.format(team, *row))

This relies on str.format() and the Format Specification Mini-Language.