Best way to display big data [closed]

Question

I would like to display this data, callable at any time, but I'm not sure if this is the best practice to do so.

countries = [
   dict(Name = "China", Population = "1,363,560,000"),
   dict(Name = "India", Population = "1,242,070,000"),
   dict(Name = "United States", Population = "317,768,000"),
   dict(Name = "Indonesia", Population = "249,866,000"),
   dict(Name = "Brazil", Population = "201,032,714"),
   dict(Name = "Pakistan", Population = "186,015,000"),
   dict(Name = "Nigeria", Population = "173,615,000"),
   dict(Name = "Bangladesh", Population = "152,518,015"),
   dict(Name = "Russia", Population = "143,700,000"),
   dict(Name = "Japan", Population = "127,120,000"),
   dict(Name = "Mexico", Population = "119,713,203"),
   dict(Name = "Philippines", Population = "99,329,000"),
   dict(Name = "Vietnam", Population = "89,708,900"),
   dict(Name = "Egypt", Population = "86,188,600"),
   dict(Name = "Germany", Population = "80,716,000"),
   dict(Name = "Iran", Population = "77,315,000"),
   dict(Name = "Turkey", Population = "76,667,864"),
   dict(Name = "Thailand", Population = "65,926,261"),
   dict(Name = "France", Population = "65,844,000"),
   dict(Name = "United Kingdom", Population = "63,705,000"),
   dict(Name = "Italy", Population = "59,996,777"),
   dict(Name = "South Africa", Population = "52,981,991"),
   dict(Name = "South Korea", Population = "50,219,669"),
   dict(Name = "Colombia", Population = "47,522,000"),
   dict(Name = "Spain", Population = "46,609,700"),
   dict(Name = "Ukraine", Population = "45,410,071"),
   dict(Name = "Kenya", Population = "44,354,000"),
   dict(Name = "Argentina", Population = "40,117,096"),
   dict(Name = "Poland", Population = "38,502,396"),
   dict(Name = "Sudan", Population = "37,964,000"),
   dict(Name = "Uganda", Population = "35,357,000"),
   dict(Name = "Canada", Population = "35,344,962"),
   dict(Name = "Iraq", Population = "34,035,000"),
   ]

print countries 

Answer 1

To format the data nicely for printing you can use the ljust method:

print "Country".ljust(15),"Population"
for country in countries:
    print country["Name"].ljust(15), country["Population"]

Answer 2

Starting with the data structure you have (a list of dicts), whose entries are already sorted in descending order of population, it appears that you want the output as a table.

The country name should probably be left justified. The population, being numeric, should probably be right justified. You'll have to decide on some arbitrary column widths.

Python has built in formatting capability to accomplish this, with the ability to extract fields out of a dictionary.

You could define a function that is callable from anywhere.

def print_countries(countries):
    for c in countries:
        print "%(Name)-16s%(Population)16s" % (c)

For flexibility, you could define a stringifying function instead of a printing function.

def countries_to_str(countries):
    return "\n".join(["%(Name)-16s%(Population)16s" % (c) for c in countries])

Then you have the flexibility to output the result of countries_to_str(countries) anywhere you want, such as a file.