Printing Unicode strings in a list

[Jon Ribbens]

On 2022-04-28, Stephen Tucker <stephen_tucker at sil.org> wrote:
> Hi PythonList Members,
>
> Consider the following log from a run of IDLE:
>
>==================
>
> Python 2.7.10 (default, May 23 2015, 09:40:32) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]
> on win32
> Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
>>>> print (u"\u2551")
> ║
>>>> print ([u"\u2551"])
> [u'\u2551']
>>>>
>
>==================
>
> Yes, I am still using Python 2.x - I have good reasons for doing so and
> will be moving to Python 3.x in due course.
>
> I have the following questions arising from the log:
>
> 1. Why does the second print statement not produce [ ║]  or ["║"] ?

print(x) implicitly calls str(x) to convert 'x' to a string for output.
lists don't have their own str converter, so fall back to repr instead,
which outputs '[', followed by the repr of each list item separated by
', ', followed by ']'.

> 2. Should the second print statement produce [ ║]  or ["║"] ?

There's certainly no obvious reason why it *should*, and pretty decent
reasons why it shouldn't (it would be a hybrid mess of Python-syntax
repr output and raw string output).

> 3. Given that I want to print a list of Unicode strings so that their
> characters are displayed (instead of their Unicode codepoint definitions),
> is there a more Pythonic way of doing it than concatenating them into a
> single string and printing that?

print(' '.join(list_of_strings)) is probably most common. I suppose you
could do print(*list_of_strings) if you like, but I'm not sure I'd call
it "pythonic" as I've never seen anyone do that (that doesn't mean of
course that other people haven't seen it done!) Personally I only tend
to use print() for debugging output.

> 4. Does Python 3.x exhibit the same behaviour as Python 2.x in this respect?

Yes.