What will explode if I import `pprint()` over `print()`?

Question

I notice that I can do this and get away with it, at least at first glance:

from pprint import pprint as print

Convenient. But I have a bad feeling about this. What sort of grue is going to eat me if I try this in a nontrivial program?

Answer 1

Beware that pprint is meant for dumping Python data structures, as it always prints the output of the __repr__ method of each object in the data structures pass to it, and is therefore not very suitable as a replacement to print:

>>> b = '''Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"'''
>>> print(b)
Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"
>>> pprint(b)
'Hemingway\'s "The Old Man and the Sea"'

So if you replace the built-in print function with pprint and want to print some readable messages, you would find the output looking funny with all these unintended quotes and escape sequences.