The Python pprint module actually already sorts dictionaries by key. In versions prior to Python 2.5, the sorting was only triggered on dictionaries whose pretty-printed representation spanned multiple lines, but in 2.5.X and 2.6.X, all dictionaries are sorted.
Generally, though, if you're writing data structures to a file and want them human-readable and writable, you might want to consider using an alternate format like YAML or JSON. Unless your users are themselves programmers, having them maintain configuration or application state dumped via pprint and loaded via eval can be a frustrating and error-prone task.
Reading the source code of pprint.py (2.5) it does sort the dictionary using
items = object.items()
items.sort()
for multiline or this for single line
for k, v in sorted(object.items()):
before it attempts to print anything, so if your dictionary sorts properly like that then it should pprint properly. In 2.4 the second sorted() is missing (didn't exist then) so objects printed on a single line won't be sorted.
So the answer appears to be use python2.5, though this doesn't quite explain your output in the question.
Python3 Update
Pretty print by sorted keys (lambda x: x[0]):
for key, value in sorted(dict_example.items(), key=lambda x: x[0]):
print("{} : {}".format(key, value))
Pretty print by sorted values (lambda x: x[1]):
for key, value in sorted(dict_example.items(), key=lambda x: x[1]):
print("{} : {}".format(key, value))
I wrote the following function to print dicts, lists, and tuples in a more readable format:
def printplus(obj):
"""
Pretty-prints the object passed in.
"""
# Dict
if isinstance(obj, dict):
for k, v in sorted(obj.items()):
print u'{0}: {1}'.format(k, v)
# List or tuple
elif isinstance(obj, list) or isinstance(obj, tuple):
for x in obj:
print x
# Other
else:
print obj
An easy way to print the sorted contents of the dictionary, in Python 3:
>>> dict_example = {'c': 1, 'b': 2, 'a': 3}
>>> for key, value in sorted(dict_example.items()):
... print("{} : {}".format(key, value))
...
a : 3
b : 2
c : 1
The expression dict_example.items() returns tuples, which can then be sorted by sorted():