I have a dict containing lists of strings and was wanting to print everything out as a table in the terminal in a format something like:

+----------------------------------------------+
|   key1   |   key2   |   key3    |    key4    |
+----------------------------------------------+
|   val_1  |   val_1  |   val_1   |   val_1    |
|----------|----------|-----------|------------|
|   val_2  |   val_2  |   val_2   |   val_2    |
+----------------------------------------------+

Is there an amazing module or a simple way of achieving this? I have a list of the column widths which I get by finding the longest val in each list.

You could use PrettyTable.

• I sorted the keys, and sorted the values. This produces a predictable output.
• I chose PrettyTable because it is installable in Ubuntu via apt-get install python-prettytable.

#! /usr/bin/env python

from prettytable import PrettyTable

d1 = {
  "key1":["val1_1", "val1_2"],
  "key2":["val2_1", "val2_2"],
  "key3":["val3_1", "val3_2"],
  "key4":["val4_1", "val4_2"],
}

table = PrettyTable()

for key,val in sorted(d1.iteritems()):
  table.add_column(key, sorted(val))

print table

The result is:

$ ./t
+--------+--------+--------+--------+
|  key1  |  key2  |  key3  |  key4  |
+--------+--------+--------+--------+
| val1_1 | val2_1 | val3_1 | val4_1 |
| val1_2 | val2_2 | val3_2 | val4_2 |
+--------+--------+--------+--------+

PrettyTable also provides HTML formatting. Replace the print table with:

print table.get_html_string(attributes={"size":"100%", "class":"MyTable"})

and you get:

<table border="1" class="MyTable" size="100%">
    <tr>
        <th>key1</th>
        <th>key2</th>
        <th>key3</th>
        <th>key4</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>val1_1</td>
        <td>val2_1</td>
        <td>val3_1</td>
        <td>val4_1</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>val1_2</td>
        <td>val2_2</td>
        <td>val3_2</td>
        <td>val4_2</td>
    </tr>
</table>