Can I redirect the stdout in python into some sort of string buffer?

Question

I\'m using python\'s ftplib to write a small FTP client, but some of the functions in the package don\'t return string output, but print to stdout.

Answer 1

Just to add to Ned's answer above: you can use this to redirect output to any object that implements a write(str) method.

This can be used to good effect to "catch" stdout output in a GUI application.

Here's a silly example in PyQt:

import sys
from PyQt4 import QtGui

class OutputWindow(QtGui.QPlainTextEdit):
    def write(self, txt):
        self.appendPlainText(str(txt))

app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
out = OutputWindow()
sys.stdout=out
out.show()
print "hello world !"