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?

Asked By: drue

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Answer 1

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'}]"

Answered By: SilentGhost

Answer 2

Are you looking for pprint.pformat?

Answered By: sykora

Answer 3

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()

Answered By: Andrew Jaffe

Answer 4

Something like this:

import pprint, StringIO

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

Answered By: Hans Nowak

Answer 5

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

Answered By: russian_spy

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

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