Question

I have a program depending on a large code base that prints a lot of irrelevant and annoying messages. I would like to clean them up a bit, but since their content is dynamically generated, I can’t just grep for them.

Is there a way to place a hook on the print statement? (I use python 2.4, but I would be interested in results for any version). Is there another way to find from which “print” statement the output comes?

Answer 1

For CPython2.5 or older:

import sys
import inspect
import collections
_stdout = sys.stdout

Record = collections.namedtuple(
    'Record',
    'frame filename line_number function_name lines index')

class MyStream(object):
    def __init__(self, target):
        self.target = target
    def write(self, text):
        if text.strip():
            record = Record(*inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe())[1])        
            self.target.write(
                '{f} {n}: '.format(f = record.filename, n = record.line_number))
        self.target.write(text)

sys.stdout = MyStream(sys.stdout)

def foo():
    print('Hi')

foo()

yields

/home/unutbu/pybin/test.py 20: Hi

---

For CPython2.6+ we can import the print function with

from __future__ import print_function

and then redirect it as we wish:

from __future__ import print_function
import sys
import inspect
import collections

Record = collections.namedtuple(
    'Record',
    'frame filename line_number function_name lines index')

def myprint(text):
    if text.strip():
        record = Record(*inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe())[1])        
        sys.stdout.write('{f} {n}: '.format(f = record.filename, n = record.line_number))
    sys.stdout.write(text + '\n')

def foo():
    print('Hi')

print = myprint
foo()

---

Note that inspect.currentframe uses sys._getframe which is not part of all implementations of Python. So the solution above may only work for CPython.