print()

Grant Edwards invalid at invalid.invalid
Sat Oct 17 01:15:13 EDT 2009


On 2009-10-17, Dave Angel <davea at ieee.org> wrote:
> mattia wrote:
>> Is there a way to print to an unbuffered output (like stdout)? I've seen 
>> that something like sys.stdout.write("hello") works but it also prints 
>> the number of characters!
>>
>>   
> What the other responses (so far) didn't address is your comment about 
> "prints the number of characters."
>
> You're presumably testing this in the interpreter, which prints extra 
> stuff.  In particular, it prints the result value of any expressions 
> entered at the interpreter prompt.  So if you type
>
> sys.stdout.write("hello")
>
> then after the write() method is done, the return value of the method 
> (5) will get printed by the interpreter.

Except sys.stdout.write("hello") doesn't return 5.  It returns
None.

I don't know what the OP is talking about when he says "prints
the number of characters":

$ python
Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Aug 25 2009, 22:35:31) 
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.write("hello\n")
hello
>>> 
>>> 

> Either put the statement in a real script, or do the following trick to 
> convince yourself:
>
> dummy = sys.stdout.write("hello")

I don't see why the assignment is needed.

-- 
Grant




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