Question

If I have the following data that is printed seperated by tabs using

print str(z).translate(None,"([]){},\"'").replace(' ','\t')

0.016611783537845426    0.5728972505882961  0.1723653381777387   0.44730982873820446    10  11  10  0.016611783537845426     0.5728972505882961 0.2526385373738682  0.03281263933004819 10  12  10  0.016611783537845426    0.5728972505882961  0.509414248773428

How can i write to a new txt file but start new line every say 4 tabs. so to get 4 columns.

have tried many variations of \n but im rubbsih.

for example:

 open("file.txt", "w").write('\n'.join(str(z).translate(None,"([]){},\"'").replace(' ','\t')))

returns a newline for every character.

Answer 1

You can use the grouper recipe from the itertools documentation:

import itertools as it
def grouper(n, iterable, fillvalue=None):
    "grouper(3, 'ABCDEFG', 'x') --> ABC DEF Gxx"
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return it.izip_longest(fillvalue=fillvalue, *args)

Then you can generate the output as:

values = str(z).translate(None,"([]){},\"'").split()
output = '\n'.join('\t'.join(x for x in g if x) for g in grouper(4, values))

Or if you want to write it to a file, use f.writelines:

f.writelines('\t'.join(x for x in g if x) + '\n' for g in grouper(4, values))