CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python-2.7dictionary
Pigna
Pigna

Reputation: 2924

how to neatly print a dictionary

I have a dict which contains string keys of different lengths. I want to obtain the following result when printing the dictionary:

'short-key'              value1
'short-key2              value2
...
'little-longer-key'      valueXX
...
'very-very-long-keeey'   valueXXXX

Until now I've been doing something like this:

for key,value in dict.iteritems():
    print key," "*(80-len(key)),value

PROBLEMS:

  1. I don't like it. Doesn't really seem pythonic

  2. 80 is a usually-big-enough number randomly chosen. But sometimes it may happen the key is longer than that, therefore the " "*(80-len(key)) is useless

Upvotes: 0

Views: 510

Answers (1)

Alex Taylor
Alex Taylor

Reputation: 8813

You will have to iterate twice to get the length of the longest key. List comprehensions can make that nicer. My personal preference is to only iterate on the keys of the dictionary and then do a lookup:

padded_width = max(len(x) for x in my_dict.iterkeys()) + 1
for key in my_dict:
    print(key.ljust(padded_width) + my_dict[key])

Here's a fancier version that allows more control over the padding and uses string formatting:

SPACE_BETWEEN_KEYS_AND_VALUES = 1
MINIMUM_PADDING = 10
padded_width = max(MINIMUM_PADDING, max(len(x) for x in my_dict.iterkeys()) + SPACE_BETWEEN_KEYS_AND_VALUES)
for key in my_dict:
    print("{key: <{width}}{value}".format(key=key, width=padded_width, value=my_dict[key]))

I think I prefer the string concatenation of the first example, personally.

Upvotes: 1

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