List Comprehension: why is this a syntax error?

Question:

Why is print(x) here not valid (SyntaxError) in the following list-comprehension?

my_list=[1,2,3]
[print(my_item) for my_item in my_list]

To contrast – the following doesn’t give a syntax error:

def my_func(x):
    print(x)
[my_func(my_item) for my_item in my_list]
Asked By: monojohnny

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Source

Answers:

Because print is not a function, it’s a statement, and you can’t have them in expressions. This gets more obvious if you use normal Python 2 syntax:

my_list=[1,2,3]
[print my_item for my_item in my_list]

That doesn’t look quite right. 🙂 The parenthesizes around my_item tricks you.

This has changed in Python 3, btw, where print is a function, where your code works just fine.

Answered By: Lennart Regebro

It’s a syntax error because print is not a function. It’s a statement. Since you obviously don’t care about the return value from print (since it has none), just write the normal loop:

for my_item in my_list:
    print my_item
Answered By: Thomas Wouters

list comprehension are designed to create a list. So using print inside it will give an error no-matter we use print() or print in 2.7 or 3.x. The code

[my_item for my_item in my_list]

makes a new object of type list.

print [my_item for my_item in my_list]

prints out this new list as a whole

refer : here

Answered By: Ishan Khare

print in python 3 makes it more obvious on how to use it.

the square brackets in the list comprehension denotes that the output will actually be a list.

L1=['a','ab','abc']
print([item for item in L1])

This should do the trick.

Answered By: Cerebration