Writing a list to a file with Python

Question

Is this the cleanest way to write a list to a file, since writelines() doesn't insert newline characters?

file.writelines(["%s\n" % item  for item in list])

It seems like there would be a standard way...

Answer 1

You can use a loop:

with open('your_file.txt', 'w') as f:
    for item in my_list:
        f.write("%s\n" % item)

In Python 2, you can also use

with open('your_file.txt', 'w') as f:
    for item in my_list:
        print >> f, item

If you're keen on a single function call, at least remove the square brackets [], so that the strings to be printed get made one at a time (a genexp rather than a listcomp) -- no reason to take up all the memory required to materialize the whole list of strings.