Question

In this loop, I’m trying to take user input and continually put it in a list till they write ‘stop’. When the loop is broken, the for loop prints out all of the li’s.

How would I take the output of the for loop and make it a string so that I can load it into a variable?

x = ([]) while True:     item = raw_input('Enter List Text (e.g. <li><a href='#'>LIST TEXT</a></li>) (Enter 'stop' to end loop):\n')     if item == 'stop':         print 'Loop Stopped.'         break                else:         item = make_link(item)         x.append(item)         print 'List Item Added\n'       for i in range(len(x)):         print '<li>' + x[i] + '</li>\n' 

I want it to end up like this:

Code:

print list_output 

Output:

<li>Blah</li> <li>Blah</li> <li>etc.</li> 

Answer 1

In python, strings support a join method (conceptually the opposite of split) that allows you to join elements of a list (technically, of an iterable) together using the string. One very common use case is ', '.join(<list>) to copy the elements of the list into a comma separated string.

In your case, you probably want something like this:

list_output = ''.join('<li>' + item + '</li>\n' for item in x) 

If you want the elements of the list separated by newlines, but no newline at the end of the string, you can do this:

list_output = '\n'.join('<li>' + item + '</li>' for item in x) 

If you want to get really crazy, this might be the most efficient (although I don’t recommend it):

list_output = '<li>' + '</li>\n<li>'.join(item for item in x) + '</li>\n'