Print a Python List (5 ways)

Let us assume I have a list comprising the 12 months as follows:

Assume our goal is to print this list. How do we do it? Learn about 5 different ways!

Method 1: Use a vanilla print

You can simply do

which will produce the output

Now, notice that by default printing a list will yield the square brackets. If you do not desire the square brackets you should explore one of the methods below.

Method 2: Use a for loop

We can create a for loop to run through the indices of the list. We can setup the extent of the for loop using the range operator applied on the list length, as follows:

This will produce the output:

Method 3: Use an iterator

Of course, because Python has first class iterators you can write much cleaner code as follows:

Note that in the above code, x refers to the actual elements of the list, like ‘Jan’, ‘Feb’, and so on. In the previous program, x referred to indices such as 0, 1, and so on.

The output is still the same:

Method 4: Use a join function

The join function takes the elements of a list and concatenates them using a specified separator.

If we do:

We are using the comma symbol as a separator. So this line will print:

To obtain the same output as before, you can do:

This will yield:

Of course, you can do both:

This will produce:

Method 5: Use the * symbol

Prefixing the list with an asterisk and printing it is another way. Let us see what that does and how it differs from vanilla printing (our Method 1 presented earlier). Consider the following code:

The output is:

Note that in the vanilla printing approach, you get the square brackets and commas separating the values. Using the * symbol we do not have these decorations.

You can also give separators, like so:

The output is:

There you have it - 5 different ways to print a Python list! Which one is your favorite?

If you liked learning about printing lists, checkout our blog post on Python print() and also four different ways toprepend items to a list.

Interested in more things Python? See our blogpost on Python's enumerate() capability. Also if you like Python+math content, see our blogpost on Magic Squares. Finally, master the Python print function!

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