Question

I have a list:

L = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] 

and I want to print

1 B 2 J 3 C 4 A 5 J 6 X 

from that list.

How do I do that?

Do I have to make another list and zip them up, or is there some way I can have the letters in my format specifier?

Answer 1

A nice way to do this is have a dictionary of numbers to prefixes:

prefixes = {1: 'B', 2: 'J', 3: 'C', 4: 'A', 5: 'J', 6: 'X'}

Then you can do:

print ' 'join('%s %s' % (num, prefix) for num, prefix in prefixes.itervalues())

If you also have a list of letters:

nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
ltrs = ['B', 'J', 'C', 'A', 'J', 'X']

print ' '.join('%s %s' % (num, ltr) for num, ltr in zip(nums, ltrs)