This is slightly off topic but I recently came across a need to generate 
some quick reports which had console based tabular output. I wondered if 
there was a quick way to do table-like formatting with text. string.format() is definitely
awesome but the sizing is fixed width. If you use a column delimiter, say '|' for ex. you 
have to put it in the format string. Automatically sizing table columns based on the cell 
value lengths would be helpful, and seems like an interesting idea but for something other than pprint.



or for something nested, which I'm less thrilled with, and haven't thought out how to implement unless you have a somewhat balanced structure, but for posterity:

   {"foo" :
              {"bar" : 1,           {"hello" : 2,               {"other" : 1,
               "baz" : 2,            "world" : 1},              "thing" : 2,
                "foo" : 3},                                           "here" : 3},

     ...
     }

That is not a valid python dict.

I think you may have been after something more like...

'foo': {
'bar': 1,
'baz': 2,
'biz': {
'x': 1,
'y': 2
}

which reflects the nesting and is suitable for the interpreter.