How do I get python's pprint to return a string instead of printing?

Question

In other words, what's the sprintf equivalent to pprint?

score 372 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 24 '22 at 21:46

372

The pprint module has a function named pformat, for just that purpose.

From the documentation:

Return the formatted representation of object as a string. indent, width and depth will be passed to the PrettyPrinter constructor as formatting parameters.

Example:

>>> import pprint
>>> people = [
...     {"first": "Brian", "last": "Kernighan"}, 
...     {"first": "Dennis", "last": "Richie"},
... ]
>>> pprint.pformat(people, indent=4)
"[   {   'first': 'Brian', 'last': 'Kernighan'},\n    {   'first': 'Dennis', 'last': 'Richie'}]"

edited Aug 24 '22 at 21:46

charlie

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answered Feb 06 '09 at 18:28

SilentGhost

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Thanks for the code, it was really helpful. As a sidenote for 2021, in many contexts it is useful to add `sort_dicts=False` to the arguments of `pprint.pformat`, because this preserves the original order of dictionaries. (I think this option is only valid with the newer versions of Python). – C-3PO Jun 02 '21 at 13:52
`sort_dicts` was implemented in python 3.8 – Gruber May 04 '22 at 13:39

score 21 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 24 '22 at 21:49

21

Assuming you really do mean pprint from the pretty-print library, then you want the pprint.pformat function.

If you just mean print, then you want str()

edited Aug 24 '22 at 21:49

charlie

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answered Feb 06 '09 at 18:29

Andrew Jaffe

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score 19 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 24 '11 at 19:30

19

>>> import pprint
>>> pprint.pformat({'key1':'val1', 'key2':[1,2]})
"{'key1': 'val1', 'key2': [1, 2]}"
>>>

answered Jun 24 '11 at 19:30

russian_spy

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score 17 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 06 '09 at 18:29

17

Are you looking for pprint.pformat?

answered Feb 06 '09 at 18:29

sykora

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score 15 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 06 '09 at 18:30

15

Something like this:

import pprint, StringIO

s = StringIO.StringIO()
pprint.pprint(some_object, s)
print s.getvalue() # displays the string

answered Feb 06 '09 at 18:30

Hans Nowak

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technically the only "correct" answer considering only the title – villasv Jan 09 '17 at 17:27

How do I get python's pprint to return a string instead of printing?

5 Answers5