pythonpretty-printpprint

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

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

Solution

  • 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'}]"