How remove blank column from table created in docx?

Question

I have written a pronunciation guide for a foriegn language. It has information about each word in a list. I want to use docx to show the pronunciation guide above the original words and the part of speech below the words.

The desired result looks like this:

pronunciation_1 | pronunciation_2 | pronunciation_3
---------------------------------------------------
word_1          | word_2          | word_3
---------------------------------------------------
part_of_speech_1 | part_of_speech_2|part_of_speech_3

Here's a code example of my attempt to get this to work.

from docx import Document
from docx.shared import Inches
document = Document()
table = document.add_table(rows=3,cols=1)
word_1 = ['This', "th is", 'pronoun']
word_2 = ['is', ' iz', 'verb']
word_3 = ['an', 'uh n', 'indefinite article']
word_4 = ['apple.','ap-uh l', 'noun']
my_word_collection = [word_1,word_2,word_3,word_4]
for word in my_word_collection:
    my_word = word[0]
    pronounciation = word[1]
    part_of_speech = word[2]
    column_cells = table.add_column(Inches(.25)).cells
    column_cells[0].text = pronounciation
    column_cells[1].text = my_word
    column_cells[2].text = part_of_speech
document.save('my_word_demo.docx')

Here's what the results look like:

My specific question is:

How can I get rid of that blank first column?

I don't know why it keeps showing up, but it does...thank you in advance for helping me!

`table = document.add_table(rows=3,cols=1)` Presumably this `cols=1` is that blank first column? — Imperishable Night, Jun 19 '19 at 01:20
@ImperishableNight, it worked! That answered one of my three questions- and in hindsight I should have tried that already. It's really the other two questions that are killing me tho.. — Programming_Learner_DK, Jun 19 '19 at 01:23
You should ask the other two questions separately. StackOverflow (SO) is oriented toward _single_ question and answer. It's up to you to fit that together into a solution to your problem. That makes the answers more focused and more likely to be useful to someone else. It also reduces the per-question effort which attracts more respondents. — scanny, Jun 19 '19 at 02:33
@scanny - thank you for the feedback and helping me be a better SO member. Have done what you suggested, created two new questions: 1.) https://stackoverflow.com/q/56663481/3225420 and 2.) https://stackoverflow.com/q/56663109/3225420 — Programming_Learner_DK, Jun 19 '19 at 08:42
@ImperishableNight - I'm reducing this original question to the single question you originally answered for me. If you change your comment to an answer I will select it as the answer. Thank you again for helping me! — Programming_Learner_DK, Jun 19 '19 at 08:43

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 19 '19 at 16:56

The first column is there from the initial table creation and it's blank because you create a new column before writing each item. So you need something like this to "use up" the first column for the first word and only create new columns thereafter:

table = document.add_table(rows=3, cols=1)
for idx, word in enumerate(words):
    column = table.columns[0] if idx == 0 else table.add_column(..)
    cells = column.cells
    ...

How remove blank column from table created in docx?

1 Answers1