write whitespace/tab to a text file

[Tim Chase]

> I would l like to write some data to a text file. I want to write the
> data with whitespace or tabs in between so that I create tabular
> columns like in a spreadsheet. How can I do this in python.
> (btw, I'm new to python)
> 
> names = ['John','Steve','asimov','fred','jim']
> ## output I would like in txt file : John         Steve
> asimov      fred     jim
> 
> f=open('/User/home/Documents/programming/python/test.txt','w')
> 	for x in range(len(names)):
> 		f.write(tags[x])
> 	f.close()
> 

The idiomatic way to do this would be something like

 f = open('/path/to/file.txt', 'w')
 f.write('\t'.join(names))
 f.write('\n')
 f.close()

the .join() method on a string joins the contents of a list with
the string on which it's called (in this case, "\t" which is a tab).

-tkc