Removing set identifier when printing sets in Python

Question

I am trying to print out the contents of a set and when I do, I get the set identifier in the print output. For example, this is my output set(['a', 'c', 'b', 'e', 'd', 'f', 'gg', 'ff', 'jk'])" for the code below. I want to get rid of the word set. My code is very simple and is below.

infile = open("P3TestData.txt", "r") words = set(infile.read().split()) print words 

Here is my output again for easy reference: set(['a', 'c', 'b', 'e', 'd', 'f', 'gg', 'ff', 'jk'])

Answer 1

You could convert the set to a list, just for printing:

print list(words) 

or you could use str.join() to join the contents of the set with a comma:

print ', '.join(words) 

Answer 2

The print statement uses set's implementation of __str__(). You can:

1. Roll out your own printing function, instead of using print. A simple way to get a nicer formatting may be to use list's implementation of __str__() instead:

   print list(my_set)

2. Override the __str__() implementation in your own set subclass.