Printing without newline (print 'a',) prints a space, how to remove?

There are a number of ways of achieving your result. If you're just wanting a solution for your case, use string multiplication as @Ant mentions. This is only going to work if each of your print statements prints the same string. Note that it works for multiplication of any length string (e.g. 'foo' * 20 works).

>>> print 'a' * 20
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

If you want to do this in general, build up a string and then print it once. This will consume a bit of memory for the string, but only make a single call to print. Note that string concatenation using += is now linear in the size of the string you're concatenating so this will be fast.

>>> for i in xrange(20):
...     s += 'a'
... 
>>> print s
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Or you can do it more directly using sys.stdout.write(), which print is a wrapper around. This will write only the raw string you give it, without any formatting. Note that no newline is printed even at the end of the 20 as.

>>> import sys
>>> for i in xrange(20):
...     sys.stdout.write('a')
... 
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa>>> 

Python 3 changes the print statement into a print() function, which allows you to set an end parameter. You can use it in >=2.6 by importing from __future__. I'd avoid this in any serious 2.x code though, as it will be a little confusing for those who have never used 3.x. However, it should give you a taste of some of the goodness 3.x brings.

>>> from __future__ import print_function
>>> for i in xrange(20):
...     print('a', end='')
... 
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa>>> 

From PEP 3105: print As a Function in the What’s New in Python 2.6 document:

>>> from __future__ import print_function
>>> print('a', end='')

Obviously that only works with python 3.0 or higher (or 2.6+ with a from __future__ import print_function at the beginning). The print statement was removed and became the print() function by default in Python 3.0.


You can suppress the space by printing an empty string to stdout between the print statements.

>>> import sys
>>> for i in range(20):
...   print 'a',
...   sys.stdout.write('')
... 
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

However, a cleaner solution is to first build the entire string you'd like to print and then output it with a single print statement.


You could print a backspace character ('\b'):

for i in xrange(20):
    print '\ba',

result:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Python 3.x:

for i in range(20):
    print('a', end='')

Python 2.6 or 2.7:

from __future__ import print_function
for i in xrange(20):
    print('a', end='')