Question

I’m running Python 2.4 in a game engine and I want to be able to turn off all prints if needed. For example I’d like to have the prints on for a debug build, and then turned off for a release build. It’s also imperative that it’s as transparent as possible.

My solution to this in the C code of the engine is having the printf function inside a vararg macro, and defining that to do nothing in a release build.

This is my current solution:

DebugPrints = True def PRINT (*args):     global DebugPrints     if DebugPrints:         string = ''         for arg in args:             string += ' ' + str(arg)         print string 

It makes it easy to toggle print outs, but there is possibly a better way to format the string. My main issue is that this is actually adding a lot more function calls to the program.

I’m wondering if there is anything you can do to how the print keyword works?

Answer 1

yes, you can assign sys.stdout to whatever you want. Create a little class with a write method that does nothing:

class DevNull(object):     def write(self, arg):         pass  import sys     sys.stdout = DevNull() print 'this goes to nirvana!' 

With the same technique you can also have your prints logged to a file by setting sys.stdout to an opened file object.