How to make matrices in Python?

The answer to your question depends on what your learning goals are. If you are trying to get matrices to "click" so you can use them later, I would suggest looking at a Numpy array instead of a list of lists. This will let you slice out rows and columns and subsets easily. Just try to get a column from a list of lists and you will be frustrated.

Using a list of lists as a matrix...

Let's take your list of lists for example:

L = [list("ABCDE") for i in range(5)]

It is easy to get sub-elements for any row:

>>> L[1][0:3]
['A', 'B', 'C']

Or an entire row:

>>> L[1][:]
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

But try to flip that around to get the same elements in column format, and it won't work...

>>> L[0:3][1]
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

>>> L[:][1]
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

You would have to use something like list comprehension to get all the 1th elements....

>>> [x[1] for x in L]
['B', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'B']

Enter matrices

If you use an array instead, you will get the slicing and indexing that you expect from MATLAB or R, (or most other languages, for that matter):

>>> import numpy as np
>>> Y = np.array(list("ABCDE"*5)).reshape(5,5)
>>> print Y
[['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']
 ['A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E']]
>>> print Y.transpose()
[['A' 'A' 'A' 'A' 'A']
 ['B' 'B' 'B' 'B' 'B']
 ['C' 'C' 'C' 'C' 'C']
 ['D' 'D' 'D' 'D' 'D']
 ['E' 'E' 'E' 'E' 'E']]

Grab row 1 (as with lists):

>>> Y[1,:]
array(['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'], 
      dtype='|S1')

Grab column 1 (new!):

>>> Y[:,1]
array(['B', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'B'], 
      dtype='|S1')

So now to generate your printed matrix:

for mycol in Y.transpose():
    print " ".join(mycol)


A A A A A
B B B B B
C C C C C
D D D D D
E E E E E

Looping helps:

for row in matrix:
    print ' '.join(row)

or use nested str.join() calls:

print '\n'.join([' '.join(row) for row in matrix])

Demo:

>>> matrix = [['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'], ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'], ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'], ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'], ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']]
>>> for row in matrix:
...     print ' '.join(row)
... 
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E
>>> print '\n'.join([' '.join(row) for row in matrix])
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E

If you wanted to show the rows and columns transposed, transpose the matrix by using the zip() function; if you pass each row as a separate argument to the function, zip() recombines these value by value as tuples of columns instead. The *args syntax lets you apply a whole sequence of rows as separate arguments:

>>> for cols in zip(*matrix):  # transposed
...     print ' '.join(cols)
... 
A A A A A
B B B B B
C C C C C
D D D D D
E E E E E

you can also use append function

b = [ ]

for x in range(0, 5):
    b.append(["O"] * 5)

def print_b(b):
    for row in b:
        print " ".join(row)