How do I get python's pprint to return a string instead of printing?
The pprint module has a command named pformat, for just that purpose.
From the documentation:
Return the formatted representation of object as a string. indent, width and depth will be passed to the PrettyPrinter constructor as formatting parameters.
Example:
>>> import pprint>>> people = [... {"first": "Brian", "last": "Kernighan"}, ... {"first": "Dennis", "last": "Richie"},... ]>>> pprint.pformat(people, indent=4)"[ { 'first': 'Brian', 'last': 'Kernighan'},\n { 'first': 'Dennis', 'last': 'Richie'}]"
Assuming you really do mean pprint from the pretty-print library, then you wantthe pprint.pformat method.
If you just mean print, then you want str()
>>> import pprint>>> pprint.pformat({'key1':'val1', 'key2':[1,2]})"{'key1': 'val1', 'key2': [1, 2]}">>>