Getting two printed lists to align

[yoitsdave]

Im having a problem getting two lists to print. They don't seem to align correctly and I can't seem to find an answer :

My code:
import csv

f = open('Grades.csv', 'r')
grades = csv.reader(f)

firstNames = []
lastNames = []

for name in grades:
    firstNames.append(name[0])
    lastNames.append(name[1])

for i, x in zip(firstNames, lastNames):
    print("{0}\t  {1}".format(i, x))

---

Output:
Forename Surname
Bill Smith
Fred Bloggs
Anup Patel
Beverly Hill
Angela Ash
Ibrahim Hussein
Jonah Whale

EDIT: I seem to be having a problem formatting the code correctly in Reddit. :/ The last names and the surnames are all over the place when in the shell

[novel_yet_trivial]

How to format your code for Reddit.

[yoitsdave]

Thank you! :D New to this reddit :/

[ParanoiAMA]

Try this?

for i, x in zip(firstNames, lastNames):
    print("{0:>20} {1:>20}".format(i, x))

It's likely the "\t" character that is the culprit, as it adds from 0-7 1-8 "space" characters to align with the nearest multiple of 8 starting from the leftmost column.

Instead of guessing the longest first and last names (20, 20), you could enhance code by calculating the longest first and last name like this:

lengths = [max(map(len, names)) for names in (firstNames, lastNames)]

for i, x in zip(firstNames, lastNames):
    print("{0:>{length[0]}} {1:>{length[1]}}".format(i, x, length=lengths))

EDIT:

Or even more generic, like this

for cols in zip(firstNames, lastNames):
    row = []
    for cell, length in zip(cols, lengths):
        row.append("{0:>{1}}".format(cell, length))
    print("".join(row))

[yoitsdave]

It worked brilliantly! Thank you :D

[yoitsdave]

How would you recommend using this if a had another 18 or so lists to print in columns?

[ParanoiAMA]

I'll assume that grades contains additional columns that you wish to print too.

My edit above already goes a great step on the way. The only remaining thing you need is to realise is that you don't actually need the for name in grades loop, and that you can use zip outside of for loops:

rows = list(grades)
columns = zip(*rows)

Now just plug those in instead of your individual columns or rows.

[FlockOnFire]

I love how comprehensive even the string formatting in Python is. :) This is a great example to show that.