Question

Suppose I have 3 lists such as these

l1 = [1,2,3]
l2 = [4,5,6]
l3 = [7,8,9]

how do I get to print out everything from these lists at the same time ?
What’s the pythonic way to do something like that ?

for f in l1,l2 and l3:
    print f 

This only seems to be taking 2 lists into account.

Desired output: for each element in all the lists, I’m printing them out using a different function

def print_row(filename, status, Binary_Type):
    print " %-45s %-15s %25s " % (filename, status, Binary_Type)

and I Call the above function inside the for loop.

Answer 1

I think you might want zip:

for x,y,z in zip(l1,l2,l3):
    print x,y,z  #1 4 7
                 #2 5 8
                 #3 6 9

What you’re doing:

for f in l1,l2 and l3:

is a little strange. It is basically equivalent to for f in (l1,l3): since l2 and l3 returns l3 (assuming that l2 and l3 are both non-empty — Otherwise, it will return the empty one.)

If you just want to print each list consecutively, you can do:

for lst in (l1,l2,l3):  #parenthesis unnecessary, but I like them...
    print lst   #[ 1, 2, 3 ]
                #[ 4, 5, 6 ]
                #[ 7, 8, 9 ]