Python "best Formatting Practice" For Lists, Dictionary, Etc

I have been looking over the Python documentation for code formatting best practice for large lists and dictionaries, for example, something = {'foo' : 'bar', 'foo2' : 'bar2', 'foo

Solution 1:

My preferred way is:

something = {'foo': 'bar',
             'foo2': 'bar2',
             'foo3': 'bar3',
             ...
             'fooN': 'barN'}

Solution 2:

aaronasterling's indentation style is what I prefer. This, and several other styles are explained in another SO Question. Especially Lennart Regebro's answer gave a nice overview.

But this style was the one most voted for:

my_dictionary = {
    1: 'something',
    2: 'some other thing',
}

Solution 3:

According to the PEP8 style guide there are two ways to format a dictionary:

mydict = {
    'key': 'value',
    'key': 'value',
    ...
    }

OR

mydict = {
    'key': 'value',
    'key': 'value',
    ...
}

If you want to conform to PEP8 I would say anything else is technically wrong.

Solution 4:

Define your dictionary in any way you want and then try this:

from pprint import pprint

pprint(yourDict)

# for a short dictionary it returns:

{'foo': 'bar', 'foo2': 'bar2', 'foo3': 'bar3'}

# for a longer/nested:

{'a00': {'b00': 0,
         'b01': 1,
         'b02': 2,
         'b03': 3,
         'b04': 4,
         'b05': 5,
         'b06': 6,
         'b07': 7,
         'b08': 8,
         'b09': 9},
 'a01': 1,
 'a02': 2,
 'a03': 3,
 'a04': 4,
 'a05': 5,
 'a06': 6,
 'a07': 7,
 'a08': 8,
 'a09': 9,
 'a10': 10}

Do you like the output?

Solution 5:

If you go by ganeti (which respects PEP 8) you should choose the third option.

something = {
             'foo1': 'bar1',
             'foo2': 'bar2',
             'foo3': 'bar3',
             ...
             }

I like this esp. because you can select only the elements you want. And I feel removing or adding elements to either ends is faster this way.

Note: As pointed out in the comment there should be no whitespace before ':' (E203) as per PEP.