Dict representations that exceed the line width are printed with one line per key-value pair, ignoring the compact=True parameter:

>>> pprint.pprint({i: 0 for i in range(15)}, compact=True)
{0: 0,
 1: 0,
 2: 0,
 3: 0,
 4: 0,
 5: 0,
 6: 0,
 7: 0,
 8: 0,
 9: 0,
 10: 0,
 11: 0,
 12: 0,
 13: 0,
 14: 0}

Expected behavior:

>>> pprint.pprint({i: 0 for i in range(15)}, compact=True)
{0: 0, 1: 0, 2: 0, 3: 0, 4: 0, 5: 0, 6: 0, 7: 0, 8: 0, 9: 0, 10: 0, 11: 0,
 12: 0, 13: 0, 14: 0}

Note that lists are correctly compacted, and that dicts that don't exceed line width are printed on a single line, regardless on the compact parameter.

I could try to work on that if needed?

Thanks for the report Nicolas. I looked into the code and it seems that pprint for a dictionary now doesn't really take compact into account. List, sets, tuple and dequeue use _format_items [0] that honors value of compact but dictionary formatting uses _format_dict_items [1] that doesn't without using compact value. Unfortunately, I don't have any links over why dictionary doesn't take compact into account. I would suggest python-ideas [3] to get more feedback about formatting and implementation along with backwards compatibility so that you can proceed further. Your suggestion seems reasonable to me but I don't know if some program is using compact=True for a dictionary without knowing the internals in mind that might break for them. I would wait for others thoughts on this and I think this can be done only on 3.8 and not 3.7 which is in bug fix mode.

[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/fdcb5ae25c0b5c82a32955617d253810ef110cac/Lib/pprint.py#L350
[1] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/fdcb5ae25c0b5c82a32955617d253810ef110cac/Lib/pprint.py#L333
[2] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/

Hope this helps!

Thank you for the feedback!

I'll try the python-ideas mail list. I posted a message on Python-list [1] a few weeks ago but it didn't get much traction.

I'm not sure about what the final solution could be (if any), but I had to hack pprint myself [2] for the scikit-learn project, and what I did was simply copy pasting _format_items into _format_dict_items, with some minimal changes.


[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2018-September/737082.html
[2]

Sorry:

[2] https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/pull/11705/files#diff-f83e8d9362766b385472f1be7fed9482R96

It is on purpose. See issue19132.

Thanks much Serhiy for the details!

Thanks for the link,

But I don't see any justification for this behavior*? Why should lists be compacted but not dicts (even when explicitly asked)?

At the very least it should be made clear in the documentation that dicts are not compacted.

* Maybe there's more content in the patch reviews but I am unable to see them

> At the very least it should be made clear in the documentation that dicts are not compacted.

According to https://docs.python.org/3/library/pprint.html compact impacts the way that sequences are displayed, and a dict is not a sequence.
So I'm not sure a documentation change is required.