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How to Convert a List to String in Python?

Python Programming
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It is widely accepted that readability is essential to any programming language because it allows programmers to write code more quickly, clearly, and efficiently. Numerous well-known companies, including those in science and technology, use Python in their software development. These include companies like Facebook, Amazon.com, Instagram, Spotify, CERN, NASA, Wikipedia, and Google.

Python is a fun language because of its simple syntax and lack of clutter. Even a simple Python list-to-string program reflects this.

We’ll see how to do that in Python in this article.

When working with Python data types, you must convert the data collected to another kind. Use any of these four methods in Python to get the same result in fewer lines of code by concatenating lists. A list can be transformed into a string using these methods: iteration, comprehension, join(), and map(). Let’s look at lists and strings and how you can convert list to string.

Definition of List:

Lists are widespread in the Python programming language. Python lists are collections of data objects that can be changed and rearranged orderly. Inside the square bracket, a list of values separated by commas is written in the Python programming language. In addition to the negative indexing elements, the index can also contain duplicate elements. Among the list’s many advantages is that all of its elements are not required to have the same type. Just like strings, lists can be sliced, concentrated, and so on. It’s also possible to have multiple lists nested within each other.

What is a String?

A string is a collection of characters, each represented by a single symbol. Using the English language as an example, we have 26 characters at our disposal. Binary numbers are the only numbers the computer system can comprehend because it cannot understand characters. Characters appear on our monitor screens, but they are a collection of zeros and ones. A string is nothing but an immutable sequence of Unicode characters in the Python programming language. It’s an immutable sequence data type encased in single or double quotation marks. Once a string is set, you cannot change it.

You can also use triple quotes to assign a multi-line string to a variable. String data types have various string manipulation methods, such as join(), split(), and concatenation. Instead of altering the original strings, this method creates a copy and modifies it.

The need to convert the list to a string in Python:

A standard Python practice is to convert lists to strings. Converting lists to strings is often used to display their contents as a string or to perform string manipulation on the list’s contents.

Python provides numerous methods for converting a list to a string. There aren’t any limitations to compare these methods against, so it comes down to what each programmer understands and prefers.

Methods to convert lists to strings in Python:

In Python, four methods exist for converting a list to a string. Let’s know each of them, along with an example and output to go along with it.

1. The join() function:

As an argument, join() takes a sequence like a list or a tuple and joins each item in the sequence in an iterative manner. It will append the empty string to the end of the list after it has been traversed. All these elements are concatenated using the join method to produce the final output, a string.

However, when you use join(), you must use the string datatype for your iterables.

Example:

name_list = [‘Oliver_’, ‘Ralph_’, ‘Lyla_’, ‘Sarag_’, ‘Aaron’]

full_name = “”

full_name = full_name.join(name_list)

print(full_name)

Output:

Oliver_Ralph_Lyla_Sarag_Aaron

A white space can be used as a separator while printing or in functions that accept white space as an argument.

Please be aware that when using join() on an integer-based list, you must first convert the list into an array of strings and then use join() to join all the items together.

2. The map() function:

To use map(), you must supply two parameters. Lists and functions are two different types of data structures. It iterates over the result object by calling the given function on each list element and returning an iterator (string).

Example:

name_list = [‘Oliver’, ‘Ralph’, ‘Lyla’, ‘Sarag’, ‘Aaron’]

#using map() function

full_name = ‘ ‘.join(map(str, name_list))

print(full_name)

Output:

Oliver Ralph Lyla Sarag Aaron

When the given object is given to str, it is converted to a string. Iterators return the results of str calls on each item in the map. We added a string together when we used the join() function. List values can be in the form of integers, so long as you’re using this method.

3. List Comprehension:

To turn a list into a string, use list comprehension and join(). We already discussed that joining a list containing an integer value will fail using join().

It creates a list of elements from the given list, traverses each element one by one, and then joins the list’s elements into a string using a for loop and the join() method.

Example:

name_list = [‘Oliver_’, ‘Ralph_’, ‘Lyla_’, ‘Sarag_’, ‘Aaron’]

#using list comprehension

full_name = “.join([str(name) for name in name_list])

print(full_name)

Output:

Oliver_Ralph_Lyla_Sarag_Aaron

4. Iteration:

A list can be easily transformed into a string using this technique.

Name list” is a list of Oliver Ralph’s first (first name), last (last name), and middle names. “full name” is currently an empty string where it will combine the list of names into a single string.

Each item is added to the string using a for loop as it’s traversed.

Example:

name_list = [‘Oliver_’, ‘Ralph_’, ‘Lyla_’, ‘Sarag_’, ‘Aaron’]

full_name = “”

#traversing the list

for name in name_list:

full_name += name

print(full_name)

Output:

Oliver_Ralph_Lyla_Sarag_Aaron

Closing thoughts

It brings us to the conclusion of this piece. Python’s list and string data types each have a unique role in the language. Learning and understanding these methods is highly recommended because they are very effective and efficient at converting a list to a string with the least amount of code possible.

Do you want to improve your Python skills regularly? You can learn the essential Python concepts by following a series of Simplilearn online courses.

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

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