How do i get python's pprint to return a string instead of printing?

Question

In other words, what's the sprintf equivalent to pprint?

Answer 1

pprint.pformat

Answer 2

Are you looking for pprint.pformat?

Answer 3

Assuming you really do mean pprint from the pretty-print library, then you want the pprint.pformat method.

If you just mean print, then you want str()

Answer 4

Something like this:

import pprint, StringIO

s = StringIO.StringIO()
pprint.pprint(some_object, s)
print s.getvalue() # displays the string