In this tutorial, you can quickly discover the most efficient methods to convert Python List to String. Several examples are provided to help for clear understanding.
Python provides a magical join() method that takes a sequence and converts it to a string. The list can contain any of the following object types: Strings, Characters, Numbers.
While programming, you may face many scenarios where list-to-string conversion is required. Let’s now see how can we use the join() method in such different cases.
Check Out: Python String to Int and Int to String Conversion
How to Convert Python List to String
As we’ve told above the Python Join() function can easily convert a list to a string so let’s first check out its syntax.
Python Join() Syntax
The syntax of join() is as follows:
string_token.join( iterable ) Parameters: iterable => It could be a list of strings, characters, and numbers string_token => It is also a string such as a space ' ' or comma "," etc.
The above method joins all the elements present in the iterable separated by the string_token. Next, you will see the join() function examples to convert a list to a string.
Convert Python List of Strings to a string using join()
Let’s say we have a list of month names.
# List of month names listOfmonths = ["Jan" , "Feb", "Mar", "April", "May", "Jun", "Jul"]
Now, we’ll join all the strings in the above list considering space as a separator.
"""
Desc:
Function to convert List of strings to a string with a separator
"""
def converttostr(input_seq, seperator):
# Join all the strings in list
final_str = seperator.join(input_seq)
return final_str
# List of month names
listOfmonths = ["Jan" , "Feb", "Mar", "April", "May", "Jun", "Jul"]
# List of month names separated with a space
seperator = ' '
print("Scenario#1: ", converttostr(listOfmonths, seperator))
# List of month names separated with a comma
seperator = ', '
print("Scenario#2: ", converttostr(listOfmonths, seperator))
The output is as follows:
Scenario#1: Jan Feb Mar April May Jun Jul Scenario#2: Jan, Feb, Mar, April, May, Jun, Jul
Convert a list of chars into a string
With the help of the join() method, we can also convert a list of characters to a string. See the example given below:
charList = ['p','y','t','h','o','n',' ','p','r','o','g','r','a','m','m','i','n','g'] # Let's convert charList to a string. finalString = ''.join(charList) print(charList) print(finalString)
The output is as follows:
['p', 'y', 't', 'h', 'o', 'n', ' ', 'p', 'r', 'o', 'g', 'r', 'a', 'm', 'm', 'i', 'n', 'g'] python programming
Conversion of a mixed list to a string using join()
Let’s assume that we have got a list of some numbers and strings. Since it is a combination of different objects, we need to handle it a little differently.
sourceList = ["I" , "got", 60, "in", "Science", 70, "in", "English",", and", 66, "in", "Maths"]
It is not possible to use the join() function on this list. We first have to convert each element to a string to form a new one, and then only we can call the join() method.
In the below code, we are converting the list into a string and then adding the elements of two lists.
# Let's convert sourceList to a list of strings and then join its elements. stringList = ' '.join([str(item) for item in sourceList ])
The final string would appear something like:
I got 60 in Science, 70 in English, and 66 in Maths.
You can check out the full working code below:
sourceList = ["I" , "got", 60, "in", "Science,", 70, "in", "English,", "and", 66, "in", "Maths."] # Let's convert sourceList to a list of strings and then join its elements. stringList = ' '.join([str(item) for item in sourceList ]) print(stringList)
Get a comma-separated string from a list of numbers
If you simply wish to convert a comma-separated string, then try the below shortcut:
numList = [20, 213, 4587, 7869]
print(str(numList).strip('[]'))
The output is as follows:
20, 213, 4587, 7869
Alternatively, we can use the map() function to convert the items in the list to a string. After that, we can join them as below:
print (', '.join(map(str, numList)))
The output:
20, 213, 4587, 7869
We can even use the new line character (‘\n’) as a separator. See below:
print ('\n'.join(map(str, numList)))
The result is as follows:
20 213 4587 7869
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