Is there a way to pretty print Swift dictionaries to the console?

po solution

For those of you want to see Dictionary as JSON without escape sequence in console, here is a simple way to do that:

(lldb) p print(String(data: try! JSONSerialization.data(withJSONObject: object, options: .prettyPrinted), encoding: .utf8)!)

Update

Check out this answer too.

You could use dump, for example, if the goal is to inspect the dictionary. dump is part of Swift's standard library.

Usage:

let dictionary: [String : String] = ["A" : "alfa",
                                     "B" : "bravo",
                                     "C" : "charlie",
                                     "D" : "delta",
                                     "E" : "echo",
                                     "F" : "foxtrot"]

dump(dictionary)

Output:

---

dump prints the contents of an object via reflection (mirroring).

Detailed view of an array:

let names = ["Joe", "Jane", "Jim", "Joyce"]
dump(names)

Prints:

▿ 4 elements
- [0]: Joe
- [1]: Jane
- [2]: Jim
- [3]: Joyce

For a dictionary:

let attributes = ["foo": 10, "bar": 33, "baz": 42]
dump(attributes)

Prints:

▿ 3 key/value pairs
▿ [0]: (2 elements)
- .0: bar
- .1: 33
▿ [1]: (2 elements)
- .0: baz
- .1: 42
▿ [2]: (2 elements)
- .0: foo
- .1: 10

dump is declared as dump(_:name:indent:maxDepth:maxItems:).

The first parameter has no label.

There's other parameters available, like name to set a label for the object being inspected:

dump(attributes, name: "mirroring")

Prints:

▿ mirroring: 3 key/value pairs
▿ [0]: (2 elements)
- .0: bar
- .1: 33
▿ [1]: (2 elements)
- .0: baz
- .1: 42
▿ [2]: (2 elements)
- .0: foo
- .1: 10

You can also choose to print only a certain number of items with maxItems:, to parse the object up to a certain depth with maxDepth:, and to change the indentation of printed objects with indent:.

Casting a dictionary to 'AnyObject' was the simplest solution for me:

let dictionary = ["a":"b",
                  "c":"d",
                  "e":"f"]
print("This is the console output: \(dictionary as AnyObject)")

This is easier to read for me than the dump option, but note it won't give you the total number of key-values.