Question

Simple question, I would like to append text to the front of every print I call, for example if I set the text to hello and ran this:

print 'hello there'
print ' hi again'

It would print this:

hellohello there
hello hi again

Is there any way of doing this, without using a function to use that instead of print?

Answer 1

You could override print as per DevPlayer’s post here on StackOverflow, slightly modified here:

from __future__ import print_function
# Note: If you are using Python 3 leave this line out
# This must be the first statement before other statements.
# You may only put a quoted or triple quoted string, 
# Python comments or blank lines before the __future__ line.
import sys

def print(*args, **kwargs):
    """My custom print() function."""
    # Adding new arguments to the print function signature 
    # is probably a bad idea.
    # Instead consider testing if custom argument keywords
    # are present in kwargs
    sys.stdout.write('hello')
    return __builtins__.print(*args, **kwargs)

print ("hello there")
print (" hi again")

[Edit] …or as DSM suggests, you could avoid the sys call with this:

from __future__ import print_function
# Note: If you are using Python 3 leave this line out
# This must be the first statement before other statements.
# You may only put a quoted or triple quoted string, 
# Python comments or blank lines before the __future__ line.

def print(*args, **kwargs):
    """My custom print() function."""
    # Adding new arguments to the print function signature 
    # is probably a bad idea.
    # Instead consider testing if custom argument keywords
    # are present in kwargs
    __builtins__.print('hello',end='')
    return __builtins__.print(*args, **kwargs)

print ("hello there")
print (" hi again")