4

I have a dict containing lists of strings and was wanting to print everything out as a table in the terminal in a format something like:

+----------------------------------------------+
|   key1   |   key2   |   key3    |    key4    |
+----------------------------------------------+
|   val_1  |   val_1  |   val_1   |   val_1    |
|----------|----------|-----------|------------|
|   val_2  |   val_2  |   val_2   |   val_2    |
+----------------------------------------------+

etc.

Is there an amazing module or a simple way of achieving this? I have a list of the column widths which I get by finding the longest val in each list.

Aaron
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4 Answers4

8

You could use PrettyTable.

  • I sorted the keys, and sorted the values. This produces a predictable output.
  • I chose PrettyTable because it is installable in Ubuntu via apt-get install python-prettytable.

.

#! /usr/bin/env python

from prettytable import PrettyTable

d1 = {
  "key1":["val1_1", "val1_2"],
  "key2":["val2_1", "val2_2"],
  "key3":["val3_1", "val3_2"],
  "key4":["val4_1", "val4_2"],
}

table = PrettyTable()

for key,val in sorted(d1.iteritems()):
  table.add_column(key, sorted(val))

print table

The result is:

$ ./t
+--------+--------+--------+--------+
|  key1  |  key2  |  key3  |  key4  |
+--------+--------+--------+--------+
| val1_1 | val2_1 | val3_1 | val4_1 |
| val1_2 | val2_2 | val3_2 | val4_2 |
+--------+--------+--------+--------+

PrettyTable also provides HTML formatting. Replace the print table with:

print table.get_html_string(attributes={"size":"100%", "class":"MyTable"})

and you get:

<table border="1" class="MyTable" size="100%">
    <tr>
        <th>key1</th>
        <th>key2</th>
        <th>key3</th>
        <th>key4</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>val1_1</td>
        <td>val2_1</td>
        <td>val3_1</td>
        <td>val4_1</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>val1_2</td>
        <td>val2_2</td>
        <td>val3_2</td>
        <td>val4_2</td>
    </tr>
</table>
Robᵩ
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4

TextTable works and can be installed via

pip install texttable

http://foutaise.org/code/texttable/

https://pypi.python.org/pypi?name=texttable&:action=display

Keys in a map are not sorted, so you are not guaranteed a particular order.

TextTable only accepts row-major table ordering, so you have to get a little fancy with the iterators:

import texttable
import itertools

theDict = {"key1": ["val_1", "val_2"],
           "key2": ["val_1", "val_2"],
           "key3": ["val_1", "val_2"],
           "key4": ["val_1", "val_2"]}

theTable = texttable.Texttable()
theIter = itertools.chain(
    iter([theDict.keys()]),
    itertools.imap(lambda *x: list(x), *theDict.itervalues())
    )

theTable.add_rows(theIter)
print theTable.draw()

Which gives:

+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| key3  | key2  | key1  | key4  |
+=======+=======+=======+=======+
| val_1 | val_1 | val_1 | val_1 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| val_2 | val_2 | val_2 | val_2 |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
Soverman
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    You should include more information in your answer than just a link. See: [Are answers that just contain links elsewhere really “good answers”?](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/8231) – Joel Cornett Feb 21 '13 at 01:33
  • @JoelCornett I know, but I figured this one would get answered faster than I could write sample code, so I wanted to get a placeholder in. – Soverman Feb 21 '13 at 02:06
1

The problem with key1, key2, key3, etc is that the dicts in a key are not ordered. Hence, I felt so free as to change your dict into a list of key-value tuples in order to get an ordering into the keys:

You could then do something like this:

d = [ ('Coco', ['verde', 'redondo'] ),
     ('Plátano', ['amarillo', 'doblado'] ),
     ('Fresa', ['rojo', 'redondo chiquito'] ) ]

def makeTable (d):
    widths = [2 + max ( [len (k) ] + [len (v) for v in vs] ) for k, vs in d]
    formats = ['{:^%s}' % width for width in widths]
    values = zip (* ( [k] + vs for k, vs in d) )
    sep = '\n+' + '-' * (sum (widths) + len (d) - 1) + '+\n'
    rows = sep.join ('|{}|'.format ('|'.join (formats [i].format (k) for i, k in enumerate (vs) ) ) for vs in values)
    return sep + rows + sep

print (makeTable (d) )

In order to convert a dict into a list of tuples, just use [ (k, v) for k, v in d.items () ] .

Putting these two things together would result in:

d = {'Coco': ['verde', 'redondo'],
     'Plátano': ['amarillo', 'doblado'],
     'Fresa': ['rojo', 'redondo chiquito'] }

print (makeTable ( [ (k, v) for k, v in d.items () ] ) )
Hyperboreus
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0

If you only need it to view the content of your dictionary in a well-formatted way, you can give a try to the Python dict formatter and viewer which seems to be exactly for that - it can display the dict (or, a list of dicts) as a table or a tree.

user2255012
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