Pretty Printing Arbitrarily Nested Dictionaries & Lists in Vim

Question

I've run into several scenarios where I lists & dictionaries of data in vim, with arbitrarily nested data structures, i.e.:

a = [ 'somedata', d : { 'one': 'x', 'two': 'y', 'three': 'z' }, 'moredata' ]
b = { 'one': '1', 'two': '2', 'three': [ 'x', 'y', 'z' ] }

I'd really like to have a way to 'pretty print' them in a tabular format. It would be especially helpful to simply treat them as JSON directly in vim. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You may want to look at Tim Pope's Scriptease.vim which provides many niceties for vim scripting and plugin development.

Although I am not sure how pretty :PP is I have found it pretty enough for my uses.

It should also be noted that vim script dictionaries and arrays are very similar to JSON, so you could in theory use any JSON tools after some clean up.

Answer 2

If your text is valid json, you can turn to the external python -m json.tool

so, you just execute in vim: %!python -m json.tool.

Unfortunately your example won't work, if you take a valid json example with nested dict/lists:

Note

that in the screencast I have ft=json, so some quotes cannot be seen in normal mode, the text I used:

[{"test1": 1, "test2": "win", "t3":{"nest1":"foo","nest2":"bar"}}, {"test1": 1, "test2": "win", "t3":{"nest1":"foo","nest2":"bar"}}, {"test1": 1, "test2": "win", "t3":{"nest1":"foo","nest2":"bar"}}, {"test1": 1, "test2": "win", "t3":{"nest1":"foo","nest2":"bar"}}]