Repeat string to certain length

Question

Jason Scheirer's answer is correct but could use some more exposition.

First off, to repeat a string an integer number of times, you can use overloaded multiplication:

>>> 'abc' * 7
'abcabcabcabcabcabcabc'

So, to repeat a string until it's at least as long as the length you want, you calculate the appropriate number of repeats and put it on the right-hand side of that multiplication operator:

def repeat_to_at_least_length(s, wanted):
    return s * (wanted//len(s) + 1)

>>> repeat_to_at_least_length('abc', 7)
'abcabcabc'

Then, you can trim it to the exact length you want with an array slice:

def repeat_to_length(s, wanted):
    return (s * (wanted//len(s) + 1))[:wanted]

>>> repeat_to_length('abc', 7)
'abcabca'

Alternatively, as suggested in pillmod's answer that probably nobody scrolls down far enough to notice anymore, you can use divmod to compute the number of full repetitions needed, and the number of extra characters, all at once:

def pillmod_repeat_to_length(s, wanted):
    a, b = divmod(wanted, len(s))
    return s * a + s[:b]

Which is better? Let's benchmark it:

>>> import timeit
>>> timeit.repeat('scheirer_repeat_to_length("abcdefg", 129)', globals=globals())
[0.3964178159367293, 0.32557755894958973, 0.32851039397064596]
>>> timeit.repeat('pillmod_repeat_to_length("abcdefg", 129)', globals=globals())
[0.5276265419088304, 0.46511475392617285, 0.46291469305288047]

So, pillmod's version is something like 40% slower, which is too bad, since personally I think it's much more readable. There are several possible reasons for this, starting with its compiling to about 40% more bytecode instructions.

Note: these examples use the new-ish // operator for truncating integer division. This is often called a Python 3 feature, but according to PEP 238, it was introduced all the way back in Python 2.2. You only have to use it in Python 3 (or in modules that have from __future__ import division) but you can use it regardless.

def repeat_to_length(string_to_expand, length):
   return (string_to_expand * ((length/len(string_to_expand))+1))[:length]

For python3:

def repeat_to_length(string_to_expand, length):
    return (string_to_expand * (int(length/len(string_to_expand))+1))[:length]

This is pretty pythonic:

newstring = 'abc'*5
print newstring[0:6]

def rep(s, m):
    a, b = divmod(m, len(s))
    return s * a + s[:b]

from itertools import cycle, islice
def srepeat(string, n):
   return ''.join(islice(cycle(string), n))

Perhaps not the most efficient solution, but certainly short & simple:

def repstr(string, length):
    return (string * length)[0:length]

repstr("foobar", 14)

Gives "foobarfoobarfo". One thing about this version is that if length < len(string) then the output string will be truncated. For example:

repstr("foobar", 3)

Gives "foo".

Edit: actually to my surprise, this is faster than the currently accepted solution (the 'repeat_to_length' function), at least on short strings:

from timeit import Timer
t1 = Timer("repstr('foofoo', 30)", 'from __main__ import repstr')
t2 = Timer("repeat_to_length('foofoo', 30)", 'from __main__ import repeat_to_length')
t1.timeit()  # gives ~0.35 secs
t2.timeit()  # gives ~0.43 secs

Presumably if the string was long, or length was very high (that is, if the wastefulness of the string * length part was high) then it would perform poorly. And in fact we can modify the above to verify this:

from timeit import Timer
t1 = Timer("repstr('foofoo' * 10, 3000)", 'from __main__ import repstr')
t2 = Timer("repeat_to_length('foofoo' * 10, 3000)", 'from __main__ import repeat_to_length')
t1.timeit()  # gives ~18.85 secs
t2.timeit()  # gives ~1.13 secs