Question

My result data is in a list of tuples, which each have a list in them:

[(['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H'], ['I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N']),
 ...
 (['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H'], ['I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N'])]

What’s the best way to strip all the nesting and quotes and write A:N to a tab delimited file?

Answer 1

The quotes are not part of the string, they denote the string. You would not be able to remove them.

The csv module makes this taks pretty straightforward:

import csv, itertools
with open('file.csv', 'wb') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f, delimiter="\t")
    writer.writerows(list(itertools.chain(*t)) for t in results)

This results in a file where each row corresponds to a tuple and a row contains the letters of both lists, separated by tabs.