What is the best way to print a table with delimiters in Python

Question

I want to print a table mixed with string and float values, as tab delimited output printout. Sure I can get the job done:

>>> tab = [['a', 1], ['b', 2]]
>>> for row in tab:
...     out = ""
...     for col in row:
...             out = out + str(col) + "\t"
...     print out.rstrip()
... 
a   1
b   2

But I have a feeling there is a better way to do it in Python, at least to print each row with specified delimiter, if not the whole table. Little googling (from here) and it is already shorter:

>>> for row in tab:
...     print "\t".join([str(col) for col in row])
... 
a   1
b   2

Is there still a better, or more Python-ish, way to do it?

Answer 1

Your shorter solution would work well as something quick and dirty. But if you need to handle large amounts of data, it'd be better to use csv module:

import sys, csv
writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout, delimiter="\t")
writer.writerows(data)

The benefit of this solution is that you may easily customize all aspects of output format: delimiter, quotation, column headers, escape sequences...

Answer 2

I don't think it's going to get much better than your second code snippet... maybe, if you really want,

print "\n".join("\t".join(str(col) for col in row) for row in tab)