How to create a tabular data structure from a list of sublists with Gpread or XLWT?

Question

How do you create a tabular data structure form this list of sublists using GSpread or XLWT in which every item at index 0 is in the first column, every item at index 1 is in the second column, etc.?

For example, I'd like to put all the a's in the following list into column1, all the b's into column2, etc. In other words, I only want one value to one cell, so I'd like 'a' in the first cell in the first column, 'aa1' in the second cell of the first column, 'aa2' in the third cell of the first column, etc.

 lst = [[['a','b','c'],['aa1','bb1','cc1'],['aaa2','bbb2','ccc2']],[['a','b','c'],['aa1','bb1','cc1'],['aaa2','bbb2','ccc2']]]

This is what I have, which is using a for-loop, but I'm wondering if there is a different method where I could create one for loop that way I wouldn't have to manually create a for loop for every extra column.

    gc = gspread.login('username', 'password')
    sheet = gc.open("Curalate").sheet1

    row = 1
    for subsublist in lst[0]:
         sheet.update_cell(1,row,subsublist[0])
         row = row + 1
    row = 1 
    for subsublist in lst[0]:
         sheet.update_cell(2,row,subsublist[1])
         row = row + 1
             row = 1 
    for subsublist in lst[0]:
         sheet.update_cell(,row,subsublist[2])
         row = row + 13

also, if this were xlwt, it's exactly the same except sheet.udpate_cell would be replaced with sheet.write and it's organized sheet.write(row,column,datapoint) instead of (column, row, datapoint).

Answer 1

Based on the comment: "each sublist with have its own sheet", I think you can do this quite simply with a nested loop. I'm familiar with xlwt but not gspread, so I'll demonstrate with xlwt syntax:

# assume worksheet is an xlwt worksheet object
lst = [['a','b','c'],['aa1','bb1','cc1'],['aaa2','bbb2','ccc2']]
for (rownum, rowlist) in enumerate(lst):
    for (colnum, value) in enumerate(rowlist):
        worksheet.write(rownum, colnum, value)

Both enumerate and xlwt are 0-indexed (at least in the Python interface) so you don't need to change that. If gspread is 1-indexed (as the Excel human interface is), adding 1 to rownum and/or colnum as needed should correct that.

It sounds like you'll have more than one worksheet, depending on the number of two-dimensional sublists in your main list. Again, you can nest for that:

wb = xlwt.Workbook()
for (sheet_number, sublist) in enumerate(lst):
    ws = wb.add_sheet('sheet_%s', sheet_number + 1)
    for (rownum, rowlist) in enumerate(sublist):
        for (colnum, value) in enumerate(rowlist):
            ws.write(rownum, colnum, value)