pip show --json

[anntzer]

• Pip version: 10
• Python version: any
• Operating system: any

Description:

This is a feature request, related to #3568 and 4824, but made more necessary by the privatization of pip's internals: let pip show gain a --json flag (or --format=(humanreadable|json)) (also handling pip show --files) that outputs the result as json (or whatever other format you deem suitable, but pip list already has --format=json (hence the suggestion of --format=json instead of --json above). Otherwise, it becomes necessary to either parse the output of pip show, or to just copy-paste pip's implementation, in order to access the same metadata.

What I've run:

e.g.

pip show pip

[pradyunsg]

Why not utilize PyPI's APIs directly?

See: https://pypi.org/pypi/pip/json and https://warehouse.pypa.io/api-reference/json/

If that resolves your concern, feel free to close this issue. :)

[anntzer]

pip show doesn't need internet access, and works with packages that only exist locally.

[pfmoore]

IMO, parsing the output of pip show isn't that hard (it was designed to be both human readable and machine parseable). It's standard RFC-compliant mail header format, so you can use the stdlib email.parser.BytesHeaderParser class to parse the output of a subprocess call to pip show --files without needing external dependencies or any code of your own:

>>> import subprocess
>>> from email.parser import BytesHeaderParser
>>> p = subprocess.run([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'show', 'pip', '--files'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> h = BytesHeaderParser().parsebytes(p.stdout)
>>> print(h['Name'])
pip

But I don't see any reason why we would reject a PR that added a --json argument to pip show. I just doubt it's something we'll get to ourselves particularly soon.

[pradyunsg]

pip show doesn't need internet access, and works with packages that only exist locally.

Indeed. Silly me.

That said, I second everything @pfmoore said above.

[anntzer]

Fair enough. I don't think the format is document though (is it intended to be stable?).

[pfmoore]

It's shown in the docs, but I take your point.

[pradyunsg]

Happy to accept a PR that adds this to the documentation.