如何在python中轻松显示顶级数据结构

Question

I am working with a (modestly) large complex structured data object in python. It is something I've imported from json, so it's a hierarchical mixture of dicts and lists. The data looks lovely in an online json-hierarchical browser. However I have trouble navigating it in Python.

If I type

pprint(data)

It gives me 30 pages of output in the console. What if I just want to list, for example, the top two levels of the tree? So for example, if I have a list of dicts (eg each of which has several keys containing several lists of keys of lists), and at the lowest level there are numbers and strings.

How can I show (in text form) just the higher-level part?

In the mean time I have resorted to an IDE which has a tree view. But surely it's possible in the console? This must be a perennial problem - people need to do this all the time?

Answer 1

Yep, pretty print does that; from the documentation , use the depth=n keyword parameter:

>>> tup = ('spam', ('eggs', ('lumberjack', ('knights', ('ni', ('dead',
... ('parrot', ('fresh fruit',))))))))
>>> pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(depth=6)
>>> pp.pprint(tup)
('spam', ('eggs', ('lumberjack', ('knights', ('ni', ('dead', (...)))))))

You can pass that parameter directly to pprint.pprint:

>>> pprint.pprint(tup, depth=6)
('spam', ('eggs', ('lumberjack', ('knights', ('ni', ('dead', (...)))))))