For loop on multiple lists to make one statement in Python 3

Question

If this is a duplicate question, I am sorry. I have spent a good hour trying to find the answer and tested a couple theories with no success. Without posting my whole code I'm working on, I'll just post the snippet.

Basically I need to print these for loop statements all into one line to run for each employee.

i.e. 'Employee Sam is 31 years old, their job title is Data Analyst and they make $90,000 annually. Their 2017 bonus will be $2,700."

# Employee List
names = ['Sam', 'Chris', 'Jose', 'Luis', 'Ahmad']
ages = ['31', '34', '30', '28', '25']
jobs = ['Data Analyst', 'SEO Python Genius', 'Data Analyst', 'Interchange 
Analyst', 'Data Analyst']
salaries = ['$90,000', '$120,000', '$95,000', '$92,000', '$90,000']
bonuses = ['$2,700', '$3,600', '$2,850', '$2,750', '$2,700']


# this for-loop goes through name list
for name in names:
    print ("Employee %s" % name)

for age in ages:
    print ("is %s" % age, "years old")

for job in jobs:
    print (", their job title is %s" % job)

for salary in salaries:
    print (" and they make %s" % salary, "annually.")

for bonus in bonuses:
    print ("Their 2017 bonus will be %s." % salary)

Possible duplicate of [How can I iterate through two lists in parallel?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1663807/how-can-i-iterate-through-two-lists-in-parallel) — MB-F, Jun 26 '17 at 12:26

khelwood · Answer 1 · 2017-06-26T12:30:44.740

7

You can use zip to iterate collectively through parallel lists.

for name, age, job, salary, bonus in zip(names, ages, jobs, salaries, bonuses):
    print ("Employee %s" % name)
    print ("is %s years old" % age)
    print (", their job title is %s" % job)
    print (" and they make %s annually" % salary)
    print ("Their 2017 bonus will be %s." % bonus)

This will still each part of the message on a separate line, because they are separate print statements. Instead, you could combine them into one print:

for name, age, job, salary, bonus in zip(names, ages, jobs, salaries, bonuses):
    print ("Employee %s is %s years old. Their job title is %s, and "
           "they make %s annually. Their 2017 bonus will be %s."
           %(name, age, job, salary, bonus))

edited Jun 26 '17 at 12:30

answered Jun 26 '17 at 12:23

khelwood

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Great answer. Probably you should also add `end=" "` argument in the `print` function to get a one-line output. – Sam Chats Jun 26 '17 at 12:28
@SamChats Yes, that would make sense. Probably easier just to combine the `print`s into one statement. – khelwood Jun 26 '17 at 12:31

Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard · Answer 2 · 2017-06-26T12:31:58.863

1

zip these together and, ideally, use a format string for cutting down the overall lines since they all use the same format:

emps = zip(names, ages, jobs, salaries, bonuses)
fmt = ("Employee {} is {} years old, their job " 
       "title is {} and they make {} annually. " 
       "Their 2017 bonus will be {}.")
for emp in emps:
    print(fmt.format(*emp))

Tweak the format in fmt accordingly.

edited Jun 26 '17 at 12:31

answered Jun 26 '17 at 12:25

Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 26 '17 at 12:34

You could also just access the lists by index if you know for sure that all lists have the same length.

for i in range(len(names)):
    print(names[i], ages[i], jobs[i], salaries[i], bonuses[i])

I personally don't think this makes the code any less readable compared to using zip.

For loop on multiple lists to make one statement in Python 3

3 Answers3