pptable, named using the same fashion as pprint, is a library for pretty printing list of dictionaries as plain text table.

Consider the following example code:


from pptable import pptable
data = [
{'slug': u'ams1', 'name': u'Amsterdam 1', 'region_id': 2},
{'slug': u'sfo1', 'name': u'San Francisco 1', 'region_id': 3},
{'slug': u'nyc2', 'name': u'New York 2', 'region_id': 4},
{'slug': u'ams2', 'name': u'Amsterdam 2', 'region_id': 5},
{'slug': u'sgp1', 'name': u'Singapore 1', 'region_id': 6}]

pptable(data)

The input data is a list of dict, pprint.pprint renders the data as:


----------------------------------
region_id  name             slug
----------------------------------
        2  Amsterdam 1      ams1
        3  San Francisco 1  sfo1
        4  New York 2       nyc2
        5  Amsterdam 2      ams2
        6  Singapore 1      sgp1

You could pick the columns and set the order of them:


headers = ['slug', 'name']
pptable(data, headers=headers)

In the example above, with only keys slug and name, in that order, the output table would be:


-----------------------
slug  name
-----------------------
ams1  Amsterdam 1
sfo1  San Francisco 1
nyc2  New York 2
ams2  Amsterdam 2
sgp1  Singapore 1

Just a day ago, a similar library plaintable was made, not sure why two coincidentally showed up around the same time. Nonetheless, I know they wouldn’t be only two.

pptable is written by Mateusz Lapsa-Malawski under the MIT License, currently version 0.0.2 (2014-04-30), only works for Python 2 at this moment.