Creating a table using a list of strings - python-3.x

Question

I am needing to convert a list of lists of strings into a three column table where the first column is 1 space longer than the longest string. I have figured out how to identify the longest string and how long it is, but getting the table to form has been quite tricky. Here is the program with the lists in it and it shows you that the longest one is 26 characters long.
def main():
mycities = [['Cape Girardeau', 'MO', '63780'], ['Columbia', 'MO', '65201'],
['Kansas City', 'MO', '64108'], ['Rolla', 'MO', '65402'],
['Springfield', 'MO', '65897'], ['St Joseph', 'MO', '64504'],
['St Louis', 'MO', '63111'], ['Ames', 'IA', '50010'], ['Enid',
'OK', '73773'], ['West Palm Beach', 'FL', '33412'],
['International Falls', 'MN', '56649'], ['Frostbite Falls',
'MN', '56650']]
col_width = max(len(item) for sub in mycities for item in sub)
print(col_width)
main()
Now I am just needing to get it to print off like this:
Cape Girardeau MO 63780
Columbia MO 65201
Kansas City MO 64108
Springfield MO 65897
St Joseph MO 64504
St Louis MO 63111
Ames IA 50010
Enid OK 73773
West Palm Beach FL 33412
International Falls MN 56649
Frostbite Falls MN 56650

Answer 1

You're off to the right start -- as an example given the specific structure to the lists you have, you can use the col_width you calculated to determine the number of spaces you'd need after the name of each city to append to the end of each city name:
for city in mycities:
# append the string with the number of spaces required
city_padded = city[0] + " " + " "*(col_width-len(city[0]))
print(city_padded + city[1] + " " + city[2])
Given your example, this will produce:
Cape Girardeau MO 63780
Columbia MO 65201
Kansas City MO 64108
Rolla MO 65402
Springfield MO 65897
St Joseph MO 64504
St Louis MO 63111
Ames IA 50010
Enid OK 73773
West Palm Beach FL 33412
International Falls MN 56649
Frostbite Falls MN 56650
Note in the original version of your question, you are missing commas in your sublists in your mycities variable, for which I've added in an edit.
As a side note, it is convention in Python that words be separated by underscores in variable names for readability, so you might rename mycities to my_cities.
pep8 ref: (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#function-and-variable-names)

Answer 2

"String name".ljust(26) will add spaces to the end of your string. For example,
Ames.ljust(26) will result in 'Ames (22 spaces here)', and then the next column will print after. If you are not sure what the longest city will be, you could replace the 26 with len(cities[-1]) after ordering the cities in a list by length. To do this, you can do sortedCities = sorted(cityListVariable, key=len)

Answer 3

def main():
cities = ['Cape Girardeau, MO 63780', 'Columbia, MO 65201', 'Kansas City, MO 64108', 'Rolla, MO 65402',
'Springfield, MO 65897', 'St Joseph, MO 64504', 'St Louis, MO 63111', 'Ames, IA 50010',
'Enid, OK 73773', 'West Palm Beach, FL 33412', 'International Falls, MN 56649', 'Frostbite Falls, MN 56650',
'Charlotte, NC 28241', 'Upper Marlboro, MD 20774', 'Camdenton, MO 65020', 'San Fransisco, CA 94016'] #create list of information
for x in cities:
col = x.split(",")
if(len(col) == 2):
city = col[0].strip()
temp = col[1].strip()
else:
city = x[:15].strip()
temp = c[15:].strip()
state = temp[:2]
zipCode = int(temp[-5::])
print("%-20s\t%s\t%d"%(city, state, zipCode))
main()