Pretty-print a Map in Java

Question

Arrays.toString(map.entrySet().toArray())

Have a look at the Guava library:

Joiner.MapJoiner mapJoiner = Joiner.on(",").withKeyValueSeparator("=");
System.out.println(mapJoiner.join(map));

Or put your logic into a tidy little class.

public class PrettyPrintingMap<K, V> {
    private Map<K, V> map;

    public PrettyPrintingMap(Map<K, V> map) {
        this.map = map;
    }

    public String toString() {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        Iterator<Entry<K, V>> iter = map.entrySet().iterator();
        while (iter.hasNext()) {
            Entry<K, V> entry = iter.next();
            sb.append(entry.getKey());
            sb.append('=').append('"');
            sb.append(entry.getValue());
            sb.append('"');
            if (iter.hasNext()) {
                sb.append(',').append(' ');
            }
        }
        return sb.toString();

    }
}

Usage:

Map<String, String> myMap = new HashMap<String, String>();

System.out.println(new PrettyPrintingMap<String, String>(myMap));

Note: You can also put that logic into a utility method.

Apache libraries to the rescue!

MapUtils.debugPrint(System.out, "myMap", map);

All you need Apache commons-collections library (project link)

Maven users can add the library using this dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>commons-collections</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-collections</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.1</version>
</dependency>

When I have org.json.JSONObject in the classpath, I do:

Map<String, Object> stats = ...;
System.out.println(new JSONObject(stats).toString(2));

(this beautifully indents lists, sets and maps which may be nested)

Simple and easy. Welcome to the JSON world. Using Google's Gson:

new Gson().toJson(map)

Example of map with 3 keys:

{"array":[null,"Some string"],"just string":"Yo","number":999}

Using Java 8 Streams:

Map<Object, Object> map = new HashMap<>();

String content = map.entrySet()
                    .stream()
                    .map(e -> e.getKey() + "=\"" + e.getValue() + "\"")
                    .collect(Collectors.joining(", "));

System.out.println(content);