It should do the import for you. As was proposed:
```
print(f"My dict: {d!p}")
```
should be equivalent to
```
import pprint
print(f"My dict: {pprint.pformat(d)}")
```
The import should happen in the same scope. Modifying the global namespace could be confusing.
A quick test shows that adding `import pprint` to `pprint.pformat({1:2})` slows things down by about 4% on my machine, which I don't think is worth being concerned about. If the dict has 100 elements, the difference becomes too small to measure.
My first instinct is that monkeypatching the pprint module should affect !p, but I see that monkeypatching builtins.repr doesn't affect !r, so I'm not sure.
That seems like a nice idea, but what would happen if pprint had not
been imported? NameError?
Rob Cliffe
On 16/07/2020 05:34, Charles Machalow wrote:
> Right now in str.format(), we have !s, !r, and !a to allow us to call str(), repr(), and ascii() respectively on the given expression.
>
> I'm proposing that we add a !p conversion to have pprint.pformat() be called to convert the given expression to a 'pretty' string.
>
> Calling
> ```
> print(f"My dict: {d!p}")
> ```
>
> is a lot more concise than:
>
> ```
> import pprint
> print(f"My dict: {pprint.pformat(d)}")
> ```
>
> We may even be able to have a static attribute stored to change the various default kwargs of pprint.pformat().