CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlist
Lucky
Lucky

Reputation: 33

How to add a string to specific element in list?

I have a list of words of variable length and want to add spaces (" ") to every word which is shorter than the longest word. I am later dividing this into sublists and therefore want every sublist in this list to be the same length!

My list of words could look like this:

words = ['sax', 'stol', 'kul', 'kök', 'äpple', 'rum', 'katt', 'toalettrulle']

So far my code looks like this:

len_list = []
for word in words:
    len_list.append(len(word))
max_word_size = max(len_list)

for item in words:
    len_item = len(item)
    if len_item < max_word_size:
        add_space = int(max_word_size - len_item)
        words.append(" " * add_space)
    else:
        break

This gives me spaces added to the end of my list, which is not what I want. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 72

Answers (2)

Abhishek Chauhan
Abhishek Chauhan

Reputation: 421

Not the perfect answer as i used a new list, Here is my code:

words = ['sax', 'stol', 'kul', 'kök', 'äpple', 'rum', 'katt', 'toalettrulle']
new_words =[]

len_list = []
for word in words:
    len_list.append(len(word))
    max_word_size = max(len_list)


for item in words:
    len_item = len(item)
    if len_item < max_word_size:
        add_space = int(max_word_size - len_item)
        new_item = item +(add_space*" ")
        new_words.append(new_item)
    else:
        new_words.append(item)
        break
print(new_words)

Upvotes: 0

user2390182
user2390182

Reputation: 73450

You can do the following, using str.ljust to pad the shorter words:

words = ['sax', 'stol', 'kul', 'kök', 'äpple', 'rum', 'katt', 'toalettrulle']

ml = max(map(len, words))  # maximum length
words = [w.ljust(ml) for w in words]  # left justify to the max length


# OR, in order to make it a mutation on the original list
# words[:] = (w.ljust(ml) for w in words)

Note that strings themselves are immutable, so you cannot append spaces to them, you will have to rebuild the list with (new) padded strings.

Upvotes: 3

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