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Asked: 2024-09-26T18:58:30+05:30 In:

How to Print Words Vertically with Alignment for Different Lengths in Python?

I was diving into some interesting coding challenges lately, and one that caught my eye was about printing words vertically. I wanted to share a little scenario and see how others might approach solving it.

Imagine you have a list of words, like this: “apple”, “banana”, “cherry”, and “date”. The goal is to print these words so that each letter appears in a vertical column, similar to how you might see them on a menu board. So the output for our example would look something like this:

“`
a b c d
p a e
p n r
l a r
e n y
“`

It’s straightforward but tricky in terms of handling words of different lengths. If one word is longer than another, you need to make sure that the shorter words leave empty spaces where needed. The spaces matter, as they maintain the alignment!

Now, I know there are many creative ways to approach this, but I’m particularly interested in how tricky you can get with your code. You could aim for minimal character count, or perhaps find a really elegant solution that still handles edge cases well. Also, I’d love to see how you manage the input. Are you going to hard-code the words, or do you have some neat way to fetch them dynamically?

To make it more fun, how about adding a twist? If we expand the list to include some longer words – let’s throw in “elderberry” and “fig” – how would your output change, and how would you handle that in your code logic?

I can already see potential challenges in ensuring alignment for varied lengths and maintaining readability. Also, let’s say you had to handle inputs where some words might be empty strings. What strategy would you employ to manage that?

I’m excited to see the different solutions you all come up with! Please share your code and your thought process. I’m curious if anyone will approach this problem in a completely unexpected way!

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    2 Answers

    1. const words = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date", "elderberry", "fig"];

// Function to print words vertically
function printWordsVertically(words) {
    // Find the maximum length of the words
    const maxLength = Math.max(...words.map(word => word.length));

    // Loop through each index up to the maximum length
    for (let i = 0; i < maxLength; i++) {
        let row = '';

        // Loop through each word
        for (const word of words) {
            // If the current index is less than the word's length, add the letter
            // Otherwise, add a space for alignment
            row += (i < word.length) ? word[i] : ' ';
            row += ' '; // Add space between words
        }
        
        console.log(row.trimEnd()); // Print the row without trailing spaces
    }
}

// Calling the function to print the words
printWordsVertically(words);


    2. def print_words_vertically(words):
    if not words:  # Check for empty list
        return
    
    # Find the maximum length of the words
    max_length = max(len(word) for word in words)
    
    # Prepare a list to hold each vertical column
    columns = ['' for _ in range(max_length)]
    
    # Build vertical representation
    for word in words:
        for i in range(max_length):
            if i < len(word):
                columns[i] += word[i] + ' '  # Append letter followed by a space
            else:
                columns[i] += ' '  # Add space for shorter words
    
    # Print columns
    for column in columns:
        print(column.rstrip())  # Remove trailing spaces for clean output

# Example usage:
words = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date", "elderberry", "fig"]
print_words_vertically(words)

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