Question

I would like a copy of the print function that is called debug. How can I alias a function in Python?

Answer 1

You can simply assign debug = print in Python 3.

In Python 2 print isn’t a function. There no way to give yourself a debug statement that works exactly like print (print 1,, print 1 >> sys.stderr etc.). Best you can do is write a wrapper around the print statement:

def debug(s):
    print s

You can also disable the print statement and use the Python 3 version:

from __future__ import print_function
debug = print

If you do this, you cannot use the statement version (print x) anymore. It’s probably the way to go if you’re not breaking any old code.