How to Format dict string outputs nicely

Question

I wonder if there is an easy way to format Strings of dict-outputs such as this:

{
  \'planet\' : {
    \'name\' : \'Earth\',
    \'has\' : {
      \'plants\         


        

Answer 1

Depending on what you're doing with the output, one option is to use JSON for the display.

import json
x = {'planet' : {'has': {'plants': 'yes', 'animals': 'yes', 'cryptonite': 'no'}, 'name': 'Earth'}}

print json.dumps(x, indent=2)

Output:

{
  "planet": {
    "has": {
      "plants": "yes", 
      "animals": "yes", 
      "cryptonite": "no"
    }, 
    "name": "Earth"
  }
}

The caveat to this approach is that some things are not serializable by JSON. Some extra code would be required if the dict contained non-serializable items like classes or functions.