Is there a way to write a 'list of lists' to a .txt file in a certain format

Question

I have a list of lists like the one below:

alist = [['Hi', 500], ['Bye', 500.0, 100, 900, 600], ['Great', 456, 700.0, 600], ["Yay", 200, 350.0], ["Ok", 200, 300, 400.0]]

I want to write this list to a .txt file in such a way that the textfile contents look something like this, with the first string written with a space after it, and the rest of the values separated by commas:

Desired output:

Hi 500

Bye 500.0,100,900,600

Great 246,700.0,600

Yay 200,350.0

Ok 200,300,400.0

This is what I've been trying out so far:

txtfile = open("filename.txt", "w")
        for i in alist:
            txtfile.write(i[0] + " ")
            j = 1
            while j < len(i):
                txtfile.write([i][j] + ",")
            txtfile.write("\n")

However, I just keep getting the IndexError("List Index out of range") error.

Is there any way to solve this without importing any modules?

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

This is quick, easy and works without any imports:

str(alist).replace('],', '\n').replace('[', '').replace(']', '').replace("'", '')

Giving you:

Hi, 500
 Bye, 500.0, 100, 900, 600
 Great, 456, 700.0, 600
 Yay, 200, 350.0
 Ok, 200, 300, 400.0

Which you can write to disk as:

alist = str(alist).replace('],', '\n').replace('[', '').replace(']', '').replace("'", '')
with open('filename.txt', 'w') as f:
    f.write(alist)

Answer 2

maybe you can try this code:

to use list() 、 map() and str.join()

alist = [['Hi', 500], ['Bye', 500.0, 100, 900, 600], ['Great', 456, 700.0, 600], ["Yay", 200, 350.0], ["Ok", 200, 300, 400.0]]

t = open("a.txt", "w")
for i in alist:
    t.writelines(i[0] + " " + ",".join(list(map(str, i[1:])))+"\n")

# if you want to do it without map()
# you can use list comprehension
# ","join([str(j) for j in i[1:])

and outputfile

Hi 500
Bye 500.0,100,900,600
Great 456,700.0,600
Yay 200,350.0
Ok 200,300,400.0

Answer 3

Other method.

alist = [['Hi', 500], ['Bye', 500.0, 100, 900, 600], ['Great', 456, 700.0, 600], ["Yay", 200, 350.0], ["Ok", 200, 300, 400.0]]

fn = "filename.txt"
mode = "w"
with open(fn, mode) as h:  # file handle is auto-close
    for v in alist:
        h.write(v[0] + " ")
        j = 1
        while j < len(v):
            if len(v) - 1 == j:
                h.write(str(v[j]))  # don't write a comma if this is the last item in the list
            else:
                h.write(str(v[j]) + ",")
            j += 1  # increment j to visit each item in the list
        h.write("\n")

Output

Hi 500
Bye 500.0,100,900,600
Great 456,700.0,600
Yay 200,350.0
Ok 200,300,400.0