pprint sorting dicts but not sets?

Question

I know that dicts and sets aren’t ordered, so equal sets or dicts may print differently (all tests with Python 3.6.1):

>>> for obj in {0, 8}, {8, 0}, {0:0, 8:8}, {8:8, 0:0}:
        print(obj)

{0, 8}
{8, 0}
{0: 0, 8: 8}
{8: 8, 0: 0}

And I just realized that pprint (“pretty-print”) sorts dicts but not sets:

>>> for obj in {0, 8}, {8, 0}, {0:0, 8:8}, {8:8, 0:0}:
        pprint.pprint(obj)

{0, 8}
{8, 0}
{0: 0, 8: 8}
{0: 0, 8: 8}

It’s documentation also says “Dictionaries are sorted by key before the display is computed”. But why doesn’t it also sort sets? Doesn’t seem pretty to me. And is there a way to make it sort sets? Also inside nested structures, as that’s a main purpose of pprint.

Asked By: Stefan Pochmann

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Answer 1

This was raised in issue 27495 and it is a bug, rather than just a design choice, but apparently has not yet been resolved.

Here is another example from the issue that illustrates perhaps more obviously the behavior you identify in Python 3:

>>> import string, pprint
>>> pprint.pprint(set(string.digits))
{'7', '1', '9', '8', '3', '0', '2', '5', '6', '4'}

The same applies for frozenset() too, but note that multi-line pprint outputs are sorted in Python 3, for example:

>>> pprint.pprint(set(string.digits), width=1)
{'0',
 '1',
 '2',
 '3',
 '4',
 '5',
 '6',
 '7',
 '8',
 '9'}

However, in Python 2, the output from the same original code is sorted:

>>> pprint.pprint(set(string.digits))
set(['0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9'])

I think it is the inconsistency between Python 3 and Python 2, and between the single-line multi-line behavior, that makes this a bug.

For dicts, a similar example, illustrates as you note, that the output is sorted in either Python 3 or 2, as it should be:

>>> pprint.pprint({i:None for i in set(string.digits)})
{'0': None,
 '1': None,
 '2': None,
 '3': None,
 '4': None,
 '5': None,
 '6': None,
 '7': None,
 '8': None,
 '9': None}

However, for Python 3.6, it could be considered surprising that pprint sorts dicts since they are ordered now. However, since this is just an implementation detail (for now) I guess there is no obligation for pprint to maintain the insertion order (yet), and doing so would break pprint‘s own consistency across Python versions of always sorting dicts.

Answered By: Chris_Rands

pprint sorting dicts but not sets?

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