What is the purpose of the return statement?

Question

What is the simple basic explanation of what the return statement is, how to use it in Python?

And what is the difference between it and the print state

Answer 1

This answer goes over some of the cases that have not been discussed above.
The return statement allows you to terminate the execution of a function before you reach the end. This causes the flow of execution to immediately return to the caller.

In line number 4:

def ret(n):
    if n > 9:
         temp = "two digits"
         return temp     #Line 4        
    else:
         temp = "one digit"
         return temp     #Line 8
    print("return statement")
ret(10)

After the conditional statement gets executed the ret() function gets terminated due to return temp (line 4). Thus the print("return statement") does not get executed.

Output:

two digits   

This code that appears after the conditional statements, or the place the flow of control cannot reach, is the dead code.

Returning Values
In lines number 4 and 8, the return statement is being used to return the value of a temporary variable after the condition has been executed.

To bring out the difference between print and return:

def ret(n):
    if n > 9:
        print("two digits")
        return "two digits"           
    else :
        print("one digit")
        return "one digit"        
ret(25)

Output:

two digits
'two digits'