15

using app engine - yes i know all about django templates and other template engines.

Lets say i have a dictionary or a simple object, i dont know its structure and i want to serialize it into html.

so if i had

{'data':{'id':1,'title':'home','address':{'street':'some road','city':'anycity','postal':'somepostal'}}}

want i want is that rendered in some form of readable html using lists or tables;

data:
   id:1
   title:home
   address:
           street: some road
           city: anycity
           postal:somepostal

now i know i can do

for key in dict.items
print dict[key]

but that wont dive into the child values and list each key, value pair when the key/value is a dictionary - ie the address dict.

Is their a module for python that is lightweight/fast that will do this nicely. or does anyone have any simple code they can paste that might do this.

Solution All the solutions here were useful. pprint is no doubt the more stable means of printing the dictionary, though it falls short of returning anything near html. Though still printable.

I ended up with this for now:

def printitems(dictObj, indent=0):
    p=[]
    p.append('<ul>\n')
    for k,v in dictObj.iteritems():
        if isinstance(v, dict):
            p.append('<li>'+ k+ ':')
            p.append(printitems(v))
            p.append('</li>')
        else:
            p.append('<li>'+ k+ ':'+ v+ '</li>')
    p.append('</ul>\n')
    return '\n'.join(p)

It converts the dict into unordered lists which is ok for now. some css and perhaps a little tweaking should make it readable.

Im going to reward the answer to the person that wrote the above code, i made a couple of small changes as the unordered lists were not nesting. I hope all agree that many of the solutions offered proved useful, But the above code renders a true html representation of a dictionary, even if crude.

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2
  • 2
    Not to be a pedant, but you're not serializing your dictionary, you're printing it (with HTML formatting). Commented Oct 14, 2010 at 7:36
  • @seth yes i guess the word serialize was miss-used. Commented Oct 14, 2010 at 7:37

9 Answers 9

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9

The example made by pyfunc could easily be modified to generate simple nested html lists.

z = {'data':{'id':1,'title':'home','address':{'street':'some road','city':'anycity','postal':'somepostal'}}}

def printItems(dictObj, indent):
    print '  '*indent + '<ul>\n'
    for k,v in dictObj.iteritems():
        if isinstance(v, dict):
            print '  '*indent , '<li>', k, ':', '</li>'
            printItems(v, indent+1)
        else:
            print ' '*indent , '<li>', k, ':', v, '</li>'
    print '  '*indent + '</ul>\n'

printItems(z,0)

Not terribly pretty of course, but somewhere to start maybe. If all you want to do is visualize data, the pprint module really is good enough. You could just use the "pre" tag on the result from pprint and put that on your web page.

the pprint version would look something like this:

import pprint
z = {'data':{'id':1,'title':'home','address':{'street':'some road','city':'anycity','postal':'somepostal'}}}

print '<pre>', pprint.pformat(z), '</pre>'

And the html output look something like this:

{'data': {'address': {'city': 'anycity',
                      'postal': 'somepostal',
                      'street': 'some road'},
          'id': 1,
          'title': 'home'}}

Which isn't that pretty, but it at least shows the data in a more structured way.

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1 Comment

sorry pre tag? how do i do that can you show me the code to make pprint return me an output that is in string format and can be passed to my template engine. Thank you
7 
import pprint


pprint.pprint(yourDict)

Well, no HTML, but similar to your for/print approach.

EDIT: or use:

niceText = pprint.pformat(yourDict)

this will give you the same nice output with all indents, etc. Now you can iterate over lines and format it into HTML:

htmlLines = []
for textLine in pprint.pformat(yourDict).splitlines():
    htmlLines.append('<br/>%s' % textLine) # or something even nicer
htmlText = '\n'.join(htmlLines)
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5 Comments

Okay - i want to pass this to html - how do i do that - Well in honest i just want it in a string perhaps and i can pass that to html?
this dosnt work? pprint.pformat({'data': {'count': '1', 'items': {'price': '$10.99', 'id': '1001', 'title': 'keyword rental oct10'}}}) it is not returining formated data?
It returns four lines with \n after each line.
Im using the code above - posted by eumiro - htmlines=[].. it builds a string with all the dict {} in and each char is on a new line? it seems the pprint.pformat just returns the dictionary back unformated?
@spidee - sorry, I forgot to .splitlines() the output of pformat. Corrected in the answer now... now it iterates over the lines
6

Here's my simple solution, It can handle any level of nested dictionary.

import json
temp_text = {'decision': {'date_time': None, 'decision_type': None},
             'not_received': {'date_time': '2019-04-15T19:18:43.825766'},
             'received': {'date_time': None},
             'rfi': {'date_time': None},
             'under_review': {'date_time': None}}
dict_text_for_html = json.dumps(
    temp_text, indent=4
).replace(' ', '&nbsp').replace(',\n', ',<br>').replace('\n', '<br>')

html view of python dict

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3

I needed something similar, but also wanted to pretty print lists, and lists inside the dict. Here's what I came up:

def format(self, obj, indent = 1):
    if isinstance(obj, list):
        htmls = []
        for k in obj:
            htmls.append(self.format(k,indent+1))

        return '[<div style="margin-left: %dem">%s</div>]' % (indent, ',<br>'.join(htmls))

    if isinstance(obj, dict):
        htmls = []
        for k,v in obj.iteritems():
            htmls.append("<span style='font-style: italic; color: #888'>%s</span>: %s" % (k,self.format(v,indent+1)))

        return '{<div style="margin-left: %dem">%s</div>}' % (indent, ',<br>'.join(htmls))

    return str(obj)

Then, if you're using webapp on appengine, you can just do the following:

self.response.out.write(self.format(obj))

This is an example of the output:

enter image description here

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2

Look at my implementation:

def pretty_items(r, d, nametag="<strong>%s: </strong>", itemtag='<li>%s</li>',
             valuetag="%s", blocktag=('<ul>', '</ul>')):
if isinstance(d, dict):
    r.append(blocktag[0])
    for k, v in d.iteritems():
        name = nametag % k
        if isinstance(v, dict) or isinstance(v, list):
            r.append(itemtag % name)
            pretty_items(r, v)
        else:
            value = valuetag % v
            r.append(itemtag % (name + value))
    r.append(blocktag[1])
elif isinstance(d, list):
    r.append(blocktag[0])
    for i in d:
        if isinstance(i, dict) or isinstance(i, list):
            r.append(itemtag % " - ")
            pretty_items(r, i)
        else:
            r.append(itemtag % i)
    r.append(blocktag[1])

Will output all items in HTML format using <ul> and <li> tags. And is also optional to change the tags. And then, just use CSS to handle with the indentation.

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2

None of the above examples give good results, so I wrote two of my own functions that create beautiful looking html output for dictionaries.

def dict_to_html(dd, level=0):
    """
    Convert dict to html using basic html tags
    """
    import simplejson
    text = ''
    for k, v in dd.iteritems():
        text += '<br>' + '&nbsp;'*(4*level) + '<b>%s</b>: %s' % (k, dict_to_html(v, level+1) if isinstance(v, dict) else (simplejson.dumps(v) if isinstance(v, list) else v))
    return text

def dict_to_html_ul(dd, level=0):
    """
    Convert dict to html using ul/li tags
    """
    import simplejson
    text = '<ul>'
    for k, v in dd.iteritems():
        text += '<li><b>%s</b>: %s</li>' % (k, dict_to_html_ul(v, level+1) if isinstance(v, dict) else (simplejson.dumps(v) if isinstance(v, list) else v))
    text += '</ul>'
    return text
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1

You could use pretty print (pprint)

or if you want to do some further processing of display then you have to run through the dict yourself.

Be warned that the code is crude and will require numerous refinements. Solution uses recursion too, which is bad, if the recursion depth is higher.

z = {'data':{'id':1,'title':'home','address':{'street':'some road','city':'anycity','postal':'somepostal', 'telephone':{'home':'xxx','offie':'yyy'}}}}

def printItems(dictObj, indent):
    it = dictObj.iteritems()
    for k,v in it:
        if isinstance(v, dict):
            print ' '*indent , k, ':'
            printItems(v, indent+1)
        else:
            print ' '*indent , k, ':', v

printItems(z,0)

Output:

 data :
  address :
   city : anycity
   postal : somepostal
   street : some road
   telephone :
    home : xxx
    offie : yyy
  id : 1
  title : home
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7 Comments

Instead of id str(type(v)) == "..." use type(v) == dict or isinstance(v, dict) (the latter works for subclasses too).
If the address key has say telephone:{'home':'xxx','offie':'yyy'} how will it deal with that?
@spidee: I edited my answer above to include your data and it will print in the same way.
@detly : +1 Thanks for pointing out the crudeness in my code. It is still crude though. I rather prefer pprint
@spidee: While I have provided a crude answer. For your purposes eumiro has suggested pprint and is more elegant. I would suggest that you use pprint too.
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0

Here is my version with support of lists (labels are verbose names of keys in dictionary):

def render_value(value, labels):
    if isinstance(value, (list, tuple)):
        return render_list(value, labels)
    elif isinstance(value, dict):
        return render_dict(value, labels)
    else:
        return value


def render_list(lst, labels):
    items = [
        '<li>%s</li>' % render_value(value, labels)
        for value in lst
    ]
    return '\n'.join(['\n<ul>'] + items + ['</ul>\n'])


def render_dict(dct, labels):
    items = []
    for key, value in dct.items():
        if not value: continue

        key = labels.get(key, key)
        value = render_value(value, labels)
        items.append('<li><b>%s</b>: %s</li>' % (key, value))

    return '\n'.join(['\n<ul>'] + items + ['</ul>\n'])
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0

imagine we have this :{name: "a", children:[{name: "b", children: [] },{..},{..}]

def ConvertDictToUlLi():
    jsonResult = GetSomeRecursiveDict()

    def CreateHtml(DictItem, output):
        output = "<li>"+DictItem["name"] if jsonResult.has_key("name") else " "
        if len(DictItem["children"]) > 0:
           output = output + "<ul>"
           for item in DictItem["children"]:
              output = output + "  "+CreateHtml(item, output)+"  "
           output = output + "</ul>"
      return output+"</li>"
    result = "<ul class='tree'>"+CreateHtml(jsonResult, "")+"</ul>"

return result
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