saving output to file

[Irmen de Jong]

Eric Anechiarico wrote:
> I am still not as proficient as I would like to be in Python, so this may be
> a trivial question to most.
> 
> I want to have the output I get in my IDE window (using MacPython 2.2.2
> primarily in Carbon) to be written to a file instead of having to copy the
> output and then paste it to a text file myself.  How would I go about doing
> this?
> 
> Mainly I would be using the code to do this with programs that calculate
> outputs of large numbers (primes, Fibonacci, etc.) and they sometimes
> overflow the buffer and I cannot get back very far to view the beginning.
> Make sense?  Basically since I am doing this in the IDE window anyway.
> 
> Any suggestions?

I'm guessing that you are now "print"-ing the results of your calculations
to the screen, as in:

def fib(n):
    a,b = 0,1
    while b<n:
        print b,
        a,b = b,a+b 

Instead of printing them to the screen, print them to a file:

def fib(n, resultfile):
    a,b = 0,1
    while b<n:
	print >>resultfile, b,
        a,b = b,a+b 

fib(2000, open("fibonacci_to_2000.txt",'w'))


You might also want to check the following parts of the manual:
http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/node9.html#SECTION009200000000000000000
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-StringIO.html

If you want you can even replace the 'default' standard output (your
screen) with your own file object:

sys.stdout=open("my_stdout.txt",'w')

Does this make sense?

--Irmen