Find max length of each column in a list of lists

Question

I'm using Python 2.6 along with the xlwt and pyodbc modules to create excel reports from a view on an MS SQL Sever (2008). In order to programatically set the correct width of each field in excel, I would like to retrieve the maximum length of the values in each column.

For example

foo=[[1, 'This is a test',12039],[12, 'test',1235]]

Would result in [2,14,5]

I'm sure there is an easy solution that I'm just overlooking.

Answer 1

[max(len(str(x)) for x in line) for line in zip(*foo)]