[nfbcs] Stuck on a Practice Project for Learning Python 3

[Lanie Molinar]

     Hi, everyone. I've been teaching myself Python 3 using the free 
online version of a book called "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python." 
I just finished learning about working with strings, so I'm now trying 
to do one of the practice projects, but I'm completely stuck on it and 
not sure how to get started. I'm supposed to print a table using the 
instructions below:


  Table Printer
Write a function named printTable() that takes a list of lists of 
strings and displays it in a well-organized table with each column 
right-justified. Assume that all the inner lists will contain the same 
number of strings. For example, the value could look like this:

tableData = [['apples', 'oranges', 'cherries', 'banana'],
              ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carol', 'David'],
              ['dogs', 'cats', 'moose', 'goose']]
Your printTable() function would print the following:

   apples Alice  dogs
  oranges   Bob  cats
cherries Carol moose
   banana David goose
Hint: Your code will first have to find the longest string in each of 
the inner lists so that the whole column can be wide enough to fit all 
the strings. You can store the maximum width of each column as a list of 
integers. The printTable() function can begin with colWidths = [0] * 
len(tableData), which will create a list containing the same number of 0 
values as the number of inner lists in tableData. That way, colWidths[0] 
can store the width of the longest string in tableData[0], colWidths[1] 
can store the width of the longest string in tableData[1], and so on. 
You can then find the largest value in the colWidths list to find out 
what integer width to pass to the rjust() string method.


I think what has me stumped right now is how to find the longest string 
in each of the inner lists. I know about the max() function, but I can't 
seem to figure out how to use that on all the items in each list. Can 
anyone help me understand what I need to do here? Thanks.