Pprint

Pprint, short for pretty print, is a module in the Python standard library that formats Python data structures in a readable, multi-line form. It is widely used for debugging and logging to inspect nested objects such as lists, dictionaries, tuples, and sets.

The module exposes the functions pprint(), pformat(), and the PrettyPrinter class. The top-level function pprint prints directly to a stream (defaulting to standard output) and supports parameters such as indent, width, depth, and compact. The pformat function returns the formatted string. The PrettyPrinter class can be instantiated with custom settings and then used to print or format data.

Key options include depth to limit nesting, width to wrap lines, indent to set indentation, and compact to produce shorter representations when possible. A newer option, sort_dicts, controls whether dictionary keys are emitted in sorted order; it was introduced in Python 3.8 and helps produce deterministic output when keys are not inherently ordered.

Typical usage: import pprint; data = {'a': [1, 2, {'b': 3}], 'c': 4}; pprint.pprint(data). For one-off formatting you can use pprint.pformat. For repeated use you can create a PrettyPrinter instance: pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=2); pp.pprint(data).

Pprint is designed to be conservative and predictable and relies on standard representations of objects; it is not a full-featured serializer and may not render custom object internals beyond their __repr__ by default.