Simple - Pretty Printing (pprint) a list with a max width?

[Paul McGuire]

On Nov 7, 9:45 am, rh0dium <steven.kl... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Perhaps it's not supposed to work like this but I thought if you
> supplied a width to pprint it would nicely format a list to the
> width.
>
> KEYS = ['search_keys', 'Section', 'site', 'Employee', 'JobClassCode',
> 'XBoss', 'Department',
>             'LocationDesc',  'cn', 'Division', 'Fax', 'SectionCode',
> 'last_update',  'location',
>             'mail', 'Nickname', 'JobClass', 'username', 'Name',
> 'Shift', 'FunctionalArea', 'p4user',
>             'euid', 'Position',  'DivisionCode', 'OfficePhone',
> 'CellPhone', 'Supervisor', 'aim',
>             'url', 'aim_id', 'Assistant', 'DeptNo', 'OtherPhone',
> 'LocationCode']
>
>  pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=2)
>  pp.pprint(KEYS)
>   [ 'search_keys',
>     'Section',
>   .
>   .
> That works but it doesn't span the width if you put a width - for that
> matter I can't seem to get width to do anything.  Anyone else see
> that?   What I want is to be able to given a list provide a nice fancy
> evenly spaced columnar output.
>
>   search_keys        Section        site          Employee
>   JobClassCode       XBoss          Department    LocationDesc
>   cn                 Division       Fax           SectionCode
>
> It's clear pprint does not do this - Does anyone have something for
> working with lists to pretty format them?

Try this:

data = [
"this is a really long entry, longer than will fit in a single
column",
"this is another one, boy this guy really talks a lot!",
"and in conclusion, I find that more is more, except when it's not"
]

import textwrap
from itertools import izip,chain,repeat

for linetuple in izip(map(None,*[textwrap.wrap(d,15)
                                    for d in data])):
    linetuple = ("" if c is None else c for c in linetuple[0])
    print "|%-15s|%-15s|%-15s|" % tuple(linetuple)

print
colwidths = [16,15,12]
fmtstring = "|" + "|".join("%%-%ds" % w for w in colwidths) + "|"
for linetuple in izip(map(None,*[textwrap.wrap(d,colwidths[i])
                                    for i,d in enumerate(data)])):
    linetuple = ("" if c is None else c for c in linetuple[0])
    print fmtstring % tuple(linetuple)

Prints:

|this is a      |this is another|and in         |
|really long    |one, boy this  |conclusion, I  |
|entry, longer  |guy really     |find that more |
|than will fit  |talks a lot!   |is more, except|
|in a single    |               |when it's not  |
|column         |               |               |

|this is a really|this is another|and in      |
|long entry,     |one, boy this  |conclusion, |
|longer than will|guy really     |I find that |
|fit in a single |talks a lot!   |more is     |
|column          |               |more, except|
|                |               |when it's   |
|                |               |not         |

-- Paul