new tip

index.md

@@ -325,6 +325,10 @@ This file gets generated by [this script](index.py).
 
 - [Make a terminal plot](notes/20240119105430.md)
 
+## Pprint
+
+- [Pretty print to a file](notes/20240529114443.md)
+
 ## Property
 
 - [Computed (and readonly) fields / attributes](notes/20230829122437.md)

notes/20240529114443.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+# pretty print to a file
+
+I was in the Python debugger today and I was wondering how to write a sorted dictionary to a file while there. 💪
+
+And then I learned that pprint's `PrettyPrinter` can stream to a file, nice! 😎
+
+Here is how:
+
+```
+import pprint
+
+# sort by numeric value descending (here: most listened podcast episodes)
+sorted_stats = sorted(stats.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
+
+# pretty print the dict to a text file
+with open('sorted_stats.txt', 'w') as file:
+    pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(stream=file, indent=4)
+    pp.pprint(sorted_stats)
+```
+
+#pprint