Let's say you had a library function foo, which takes no arguments, does an expensive computation, and then prints a single result to the console. You need the function to instead return the value, so that you can do more computation on it. You could write a wrapper function that will call foo, but replace the print function with one that records the printed result.
For example:
def foo():
print('usually this value is inaccessible from "python land"')
def extract_printed_values(bar):
global print
old_print, returnv = print, None
def new_print(x):
nonlocal returnv
old_print(returnv := x)
print = new_print
bar()
print = old_print
return returnv
fooval = extract_printed_values(foo)
fooval will then be equal to whatever value foo printed to the console, otherwise foo will behave exactly the same as normal (assuming it only printed a single value), and print will even behave normally afterwards
For example:
fooval will then be equal to whatever value foo printed to the console, otherwise foo will behave exactly the same as normal (assuming it only printed a single value), and print will even behave normally afterwards