Question

Is there a way where I’m able to generate the code in a file for a python data structure.

For example, if I had a dictionary, it would create a file with:
name_of_variable = { key: value, key:value}

and so on. The use for this is testing where I don’t want to manually code up a lot of data structures for my tests and I’d rather create some template structures where I can edit manually.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For simple data structures such dict, list, set and other built-in things you can use repr():

>>> d = {'a': 2, 'b': 3, 'c': 4}
>>> repr(d)
"{'a': 2, 'c': 4, 'b': 3}"
>>> l = range(10)
>>> repr(l)
'[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]'
>>> s = set(range(10))
>>> repr(s)
'set([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])'

Documentation says: ”For many types, this function makes an attempt to return a string that would yield an object with the same value when passed to eval()”.