Hello, group: I've just begun some introductory tutorials in Python. Taking off from the "word play" exercise at
<http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/book010.html#toc96> I've written a mini-program to tabulate the number of characters in each word in a file. Once the data have been collected in a list, the output is produced by a while loop that steps through it by incrementing an index "i", saying print '%2u %6u %4.2f' % \ (i, wordcounts[i], 100.0 * wordcounts[i] / wordcounts[0]) My problem is with the last entry in each line, which isn't getting padded: 1 0 0.00 2 85 0.07 3 908 0.80 4 3686 3.24 5 8258 7.26 6 14374 12.63 7 21727 19.09 8 26447 23.24 9 16658 14.64 10 9199 8.08 11 5296 4.65 12 3166 2.78 13 1960 1.72 14 1023 0.90 15 557 0.49 16 261 0.23 17 132 0.12 18 48 0.04 19 16 0.01 20 5 0.00 21 3 0.00 I've tried varying the number before the decimal in the formatting string; "F", "g", and "G" conversions instead of "f"; and a couple of other permutations (including replacing the arithmetical expression in the tuple with a variable, defined on the previous line), but I can't seem to get the decimal points to line up. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I'd appreciate a tip -- thanks in advance! FWIW I'm running Python 2.3.5 (#1, Oct 5 2005, 11:07:27) [GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1809)] on darwin from the Terminal on Mac OS X v10.4.11. P.S. Is there a preferable technique for forcing floating-point division of two integers to that used above, multiplying by "100.0" first? What about if I just wanted a ratio: is "float(n / m)" better than "1.0 * n / m"? -- Odysseus -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
