Question

Let’s say I have this string:

"""line1
line2
line3
line4
line5
line6
line7
line8"""

I want to write a function to split it into two equal-sized columns represented by a single string, like so:

"""line1 line5
line2 line6
line3 line7
line4 line8"""

I can split the string in two like this:
s1,s2 = s[:len(s)//2], s[len(s)//2:]

But then I’m unsure on how to combine them…

Answer 1

Take what you’ve got and then:

>>> s ="""line1
line2
line3
line4
line5
line6
line7
line8"""
>>> s1, s2 = s[:len(s)//2], s[len(s)//2:]
>>> '\n'.join([' '.join(x) for x in zip(s1.split('\n'),s2[1:].split('\n'))])
'line1 line5\nline2 line6\nline3 line7\nline4 line8'

Nasty one-liner, but that’s the basic premise, just use zip to pair the sequence items up and then you can join them back together.