How to Format dict string outputs nicely

Question

I wonder if there is an easy way to format Strings of dict-outputs such as this:

{   'planet' : {     'name' : 'Earth',     'has' : {       'plants' : 'yes',       'animals' : 'yes',       'cryptonite' : 'no'     }   } } 

..., where a simple str(dict) just would give you a quite unreadable ...

{'planet' : {'has': {'plants': 'yes', 'animals': 'yes', 'cryptonite': 'no'}, 'name': 'Earth'}} 

For as much as I know about Python I would have to write a lot of code with many special cases and string.replace() calls, where this problem itself does not look so much like a 1000-lines-problem.

Please suggest the easiest way to format any dict according to this shape.

Answer 1

Depending on what you're doing with the output, one option is to use JSON for the display.

import json x = {'planet' : {'has': {'plants': 'yes', 'animals': 'yes', 'cryptonite': 'no'}, 'name': 'Earth'}}  print json.dumps(x, indent=2) 

Output:

{   "planet": {     "has": {       "plants": "yes",        "animals": "yes",        "cryptonite": "no"     },      "name": "Earth"   } } 

The caveat to this approach is that some things are not serializable by JSON. Some extra code would be required if the dict contained non-serializable items like classes or functions.

Answer 2

Use pprint

import pprint  x  = {   'planet' : {     'name' : 'Earth',     'has' : {       'plants' : 'yes',       'animals' : 'yes',       'cryptonite' : 'no'     }   } } pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=4) pp.pprint(x) 

This outputs

{   'planet': {   'has': {   'animals': 'yes',                              'cryptonite': 'no',                              'plants': 'yes'},                   'name': 'Earth'}} 

Play around with pprint formatting and you can get the desired result.

• http://docs.python.org/library/pprint.html