Someone asked me this question the other day, and I couldn't think of
any easy way of printing the output besides what I came up with pasted
below.
So what you have is a file with words in it as such:
apple
john
bean
joke
ample
python
nice
and you want to sort and output the text into columns as such:
a p j b n
apple python john bean nice
ample joke
and this is what works, but I would also like to know how to wrap the
columns, plus any ideas on a better way to accomplish this.
#!/usr/bin/env python
data = {}
lrgColumn = 0
for line in open("test.txt","r").read().splitlines():
char = line[0].lower()
if not char in data:
data[char] = [line]
else:
data[char].append(line)
for item in data:
print item.ljust(10),
if len(data[item]) > lrgColumn:
lrgColumn = len(data[item])
print
for item in range(lrgColumn):
for i in data.iteritems():
try:
print i[1][item].ljust(10),
except IndexError:
print "".ljust(10),
print
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