Python 3 print() to a variable

Question

In Python 3, you can use the print function to write the data to a file (e.g. `print('my data', file=my_open_file)`. This is well and good (and very cool). But can you `print` to a (string?) variable? If so, how? In my specific use case, I am trying to avoid writing the data to a tempfile on disk just to turn and read that tempfile. Edit: I'm can't just assign because my source data isn't a string, rather it's part of the html document tree as extracted by BeautifulSoup. Once I have the document tree extracted, I'm going to process it line by line. My Code: (working now!) ``` with open("index.html", "r") as soup_file: soup = BeautifulSoup(soup_file) THE_BODY = soup.find('body') not_file = io.StringIO() print(THE_BODY, file = not_file) # dump the contents of the <body> tag into a file-like stream with codecs.open('header.js', "w", "utf-8") as HEADER_JS: for line in not_file2.getvalue().split('
'): print("headerblock += '{}'".format(line), file = HEADER_JS) ``` Better, Working Code: ``…

Accepted Answer

UPDATED RESPONSE BASED ON UPDATED QUESTION

If all you need to do is convert your object as a string, simply call the `str` function on the variable... this is what `print` does internally.

```
a = str(soup.find('body'))
```

Calling `print` does a whole bunch of other stuff that you don't need if all you need is a string representation.

ORIGINAL RESPONSE

You can use io.StringIO.

```
import io 
f = io.StringIO()
print('my data', file=f)

# to get the value back
a = f.getvalue()
print(a)
f.close()
```

Note that on python2 this is under `StringIO.StringIO`.

This solution is good for when you have pre-existing code that wants to print to file, but you would rather capture that output in a variable.

Python 3 print() to a variable

Solution

Problem