Any way to properly pretty-print ordered dictionaries?

Question

I like the pprint module in Python. I use it a lot for testing and debugging. I frequently use the width option to make sure the output fits nicely within my terminal window.

It has worked fine until they added the new ordered dictionary type in Python 2.7 (another cool feature I really like). If I try to pretty-print an ordered dictionary, it doesn't show nicely. Instead of having each key-value pair on its own line, the whole thing shows up on one long line, which wraps many times and is hard to read.

Does anyone here have a way to make it print nicely, like the old unordered dictionaries? I could probably figure something out, possibly using the PrettyPrinter.format method, if I spend enough time, but I am wondering if anyone here already knows of a solution.

UPDATE: I filed a bug report for this. You can see it at http://bugs.python.org/issue10592.

Answer 1

As a temporary workaround you can try dumping in JSON format. You lose some type information, but it looks nice and keeps the order.

import json

pprint(data, indent=4)
# ^ugly

print(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
# ^nice