Writing a whole list AS SUCH to a text file in Python

Question

In python I don't want to write every single element into a file but a whole list as such. That means the text file should look like this for example:

["elem1", "elem2", "elem3"]
["elem1", "elem2", "elem3"]
["elem1", "elem2", "elem3"]

This is one examples to write each element from a list into a text file (Writing a list to a file with Python). But I don't need this, as I said.

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Here are three ways:

import json


l = ["elem1", "elem2", "elem3"]
print(str(l))
print(repr(l))
print(json.dumps(l))

Prints:

['elem1', 'elem2', 'elem3']
['elem1', 'elem2', 'elem3']
["elem1", "elem2", "elem3"]

You can, of course, direct your print statement to an output file.

Answer 2

Updated from original answer using list.__str__()

You can achieve this by making use of str() as below.

l = [1, 'this', 'is', 'a', 'list']

with open('example.txt', 'w') as f:
    f.write(str(l))

Contents of example.txt

[1, 'this', 'is', 'a', 'list']

Answer 3

You can try like this:

with open('FILE.txt', 'w+') as f:
    f.write(myList.__str__())