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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.