How to force pprint to print one list/tuple/dict element per line?

Question

How can I force pprint() to print one list/tuple/dict element per line?

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> my_var = ['one', 'two', ('red','green'), {'state' : 'Oregon', 'city' : 'Portland'}]
>>> pprint(my_var)
['one', 'two', ('red', 'green'), {'city': 'Portland', 'state': 'Oregon'}]

I would like the output to be something like:

['one',
 'two',
 ('red',
  'green'),
 {'city': 'Portland',
  'state': 'Oregon'}]

Salmi

Answer 1

Use a width=1 argument to pprint():

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> my_var = ['one', 'two', ('red','green'), {'state' : 'Oregon', 'city' : 'Portland'}]
>>> pprint(my_var, width=1)
['one',
 'two',
 ('red',
  'green'),
 {'city': 'Portland',
  'state': 'Oregon'}]
>>>

"pprint - Data pretty printer" documentation

Salmi

This works well for relatively flat objects but does not work out to one per line for deeply nested objects whereas I'd like to achieve a newline after each opening brace. For instance, try pprinting {u'a': {u'b': {u'c': {u'd': {u'foo': 1, u'bar': 2}}}}}. – Miniature

@TaylorEdmiston if your dictionary can be json encoded then a quick way to achieve that would be to use: print(json.dumps(mydict, indent=2)) – Guanabara

Thanks! This got me looking at all the pprint options... I'm generating some python code with very large nested dictionaries, and I wanted to be able to print pretty long lines, but wrap them at a width that wouldn't make my IDE (Eclipse) barf. I used width=4000 and compact=true. Of course, I wish Eclipse's editor could handle long lines... – Cobaltite

Answer 2

I use:

print(json.dumps(mydict, 
         indent=2).replace('true','True').replace('false','False'))

Otherwise, json transforms boolean values to lowercase. Of course, it doesn't work correctly if these keywords are part of some other string! Then regex replacements can be used.

Ivory

It works great for list for strings and printing each on a separate line. – Gwenn