How to print out a dictionary nicely in Python?

I've just started to learn python and I'm building a text game. I want an inventory system, but I can't seem to print out the dictionary without it looking ugly.

This is what I have so far:

def inventory(): for numberofitems in len(inventory_content.keys()): inventory_things = list(inventory_content.keys()) inventory_amounts = list(inventory_content.values()) print(inventory_things[numberofitems])

3

9 Answers

I like the pprint module (Pretty Print) included in Python. It can be used to either print the object, or format a nice string version of it.

import pprint
# Prints the nicely formatted dictionary
pprint.pprint(dictionary)
# Sets 'pretty_dict_str' to the formatted string value
pretty_dict_str = pprint.pformat(dictionary)

But it sounds like you are printing out an inventory, which users will likely want shown as something more like the following:

def print_inventory(dct): print("Items held:") for item, amount in dct.items(): # dct.iteritems() in Python 2 print("{} ({})".format(item, amount))
inventory = { "shovels": 3, "sticks": 2, "dogs": 1,
}
print_inventory(inventory)

which prints:

Items held:
shovels (3)
sticks (2)
dogs (1)

4

My favorite way:

import json
print(json.dumps(dictionary, indent=4, sort_keys=True))

4

Here's the one-liner I'd use. (Edit: works for things that aren't JSON-serializable too)

print("\n".join("{}\t{}".format(k, v) for k, v in dictionary.items()))

Explanation: This iterates through the keys and values of the dictionary, creating a formatted string like key + tab + value for each. And "\n".join(... puts newlines between all those strings, forming a new string.

Example:

>>> dictionary = {1: 2, 4: 5, "foo": "bar"}
>>> print("\n".join("{}\t{}".format(k, v) for k, v in dictionary.items()))
1 2
4 5
foo bar
>>>

Edit 2: Here's a sorted version.

"\n".join("{}\t{}".format(k, v) for k, v in sorted(dictionary.items(), key=lambda t: str(t[0])))

2

I would suggest to use beeprint instead of pprint.

Examples:

pprint

{'entities': {'hashtags': [], 'urls': [{'display_url': ' 'indices': [107, 126], 'url': ' 'user_mentions': []}}

beeprint

{ 'entities': { 'hashtags': [], 'urls': [ { 'display_url': ' 'indices': [107, 126], 'url': ' }, ], 'user_mentions': [], },
}

1

Yaml is typically much more readable, especially if you have complicated nested objects, hierarchies, nested dictionaries etc:

First make sure you have pyyaml module:

pip install pyyaml

Then,

import yaml
print(yaml.dump(my_dict))

1

I wrote this function to print simple dictionaries:

def dictToString(dict): return str(dict).replace(', ','\r\n').replace("u'","").replace("'","")[1:-1]

1

Agree, "nicely" is very subjective. See if this helps, which I have been using to debug dict

for i in inventory_things.keys(): logger.info('Key_Name:"{kn}", Key_Value:"{kv}"'.format(kn=i, kv=inventory_things[i]))

I did create function (in Python 3):

def print_dict(dict): print( str(dict) .replace(', ', '\n') .replace(': ', ':\t') .replace('{', '') .replace('}', '') )

Maybe it doesn't fit all the needs but I just tried this and it got a nice formatted output So just convert the dictionary to Dataframe and that's pretty much all

pd.DataFrame(your_dic.items())

You can also define columns to assist even more the readability

pd.DataFrame(your_dic.items(),columns={'Value','key'})

So just give a try :

print(pd.DataFrame(your_dic.items(),columns={'Value','key'}))