[Web-SIG] Direct use of sys.stdout, sys.stderr and sys.stdin in WSGI application.

[Ian Bicking]

Graham Dumpleton wrote:
>> As an avid use of "print" for debugging, this would bug me.  I would
>> prefer just avoiding the CGI case where stdout goes to the client, and
>> otherwise saying that the server should try to put stdout output
>> someplace where it can be read.  But it could very well be a console,
>> not necessarily a log file.  Or the same log file as stderr, or...
>> something.
> 
> Although using 'print' is handy. The reason I  was making sys.stdout
> off limits and not just merging the output with sys.stderr, is that at
> least one Python web framework hijacks sys.stdout for their own
> purposes so that people can use 'print' to generate the actual content
> of the response. The package that does this is web.py
> (http://webpy.org/). Not sure if there are others which do this.

I don't know of any others.  As a debugging tool I'm not as concerned, 
as if a web.py user used something I wrote I would have hopefully 
removed all prints -- if I hadn't, it would be a bug (not an uncommon 
bug, but a bug).  And the web.py user just won't do this, because 
they'll instantly break their app.

Paste also has something that will capture prints/sys.stdout and put it 
into the page that is served up (paste.debug.prints).  That middleware 
strategy would probably work regardless of what the server does.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org
             | Write code, do good | http://topp.openplans.org/careers