Ha, clever. It didn't occur to me that I could use zip for extracting columns from a table. I personally prefer readable to compact, so this is what I ended up

Ha, clever. It didn't occur to me that I could use zip for extracting columns from a table. I personally prefer readable to compact, so this is what I ended up with, inspired by your version: tab_width = 4 columns = zip(*table) column_widths = [ max(len(item) for item in column) for column in columns ] column_indents = [ tab_width * ((width // tab_width) + 1) for width in column_widths ] for row in table: items = [ f'{item:<{indent}}' for item, indent in zip(row, column_indents) ] print(''.join(items).rstrip())