I had a function I needed to call that insisted on being very verbose and printing a lot of stuff to the console that I didn’t want to see. But the rest of the script printed beautiful things. So the problem was, how can I disable printing ONLY while I call this function?

Here’s what I came up with. It’s primitive but it seems to work.

#Quick, turn off printing!
class dummyStream:
	''' dummyStream behaves like a stream but does nothing. '''
	def __init__(self): pass
	def write(self,data): pass
	def read(self,data): pass
	def flush(self): pass
	def close(self): pass
# Copy old print deals
old_printerators=[sys.stdout,sys.stderr,sys.stdin,sys.__stdout__,sys.__stderr__,sys.__stdin__][:]
# redirect all print deals
sys.stdout,sys.stderr,sys.stdin,sys.__stdout__,sys.__stderr__,sys.__stdin__=dummyStream(),dummyStream(),dummyStream(),dummyStream(),dummyStream(),dummyStream()

#call your verbose function here
verbose_function()

#Turn printing back on!
sys.stdout,sys.stderr,sys.stdin,sys.__stdout__,sys.__stderr__,sys.__stdin__=old_printerators

I really just repurposed this recipe: “No print error in console-less environments”. It would be smart to put this whole thing into another function such as “call_without_printing”, and just give that any function you want to run silently.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Python at 5:23 PM MST

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These are links associated with recent searches I’ve done. They’re not difficult enough to warrant to their own posts but you may still find them useful.

Tags: Ajax, Applet, Applications, Backup, Becky, Boot, Business, Code, Collaberation, Css, Design, Directory, Gnome, Google, Googlecalendar, Idea, Ideas, Ie6, Mbr, Mediawiki, Paste, Pastebin, Png, Rsync, Share, Snippets, Startup, Syntax, Ubuntu, Web2.0, Webdesign, Wiki, Win32, Windows

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Uncategorized at 4:30 AM MST

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Mechanize is a handy, high level, programmatic web browser type deal for Python. Use it for all of your screen scraping needs. Here are a few tips I had to figure out on my own:

How to set the user agent:

from mechanize import Browser
browser = Browser()
browser.addheaders = [("User-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;
MyProgram/0.1)")]
browser.open('http://www.python.org')

How to see the data you’ve fetched:

from mechanize import Browser
browser = Browser()
browser.open('http://www.python.org')
print browser.response().read()

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Python at 1:56 AM MST

2 Comments »

Here you go:
lambda x: ['',x][int(bool(x))]

I got tired of constantly pasting this function in all my code:

def none2blank(val):
    if val:return val
    else:return ''

So I really wanted an expression that would do the same thing. Hopefully I’ve discovered it now. So I can use it like this:
print some_function_that_MUST_have_a_string(['',x][int(bool(x))])

Go enjoy it, or alternatively tell me why it won’t work, or why I shouldn’t need this. All feedback is welcome.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Python at 4:53 PM MST

8 Comments »

These are links associated with recent searches I’ve done. They’re not difficult enough to warrant to their own posts but you may still find them useful.

Tags: Desktop, Editor, Html, Iis, Javascript, Mssql, Null, Python, Sas, Search, Sql, Sqlserver, Toread, Ubuntu, Unicode, Virtualization, Vmware, Win32, Wordpress, Wsgi, Wysiwyg

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Uncategorized at 4:30 AM MST

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