Python, the Console and exporting to a file

Question

I have a function that prints text to the console. Below is a version of what the code looks like (it's actually a lot of lines of a story, so I'm summarizing it.) My question is - is there another function I can write to take all_text() and generate a docx file with the it? I've managed to create a .txt file, but I would ideally like to create something with formatting options.

from docx import Document


document = Document()

def all_text():
     print("Line1\nLine2\nLine3")

document.add_paragraph(all_text())
document.save("demo.docx")

Answer 1

Document.add_paragraph() expects a string. Your all_text() function is not returning a string, but writing to sys.stdout (which is by default redirected to your console) and (implicitely) returning None .

The clean solution is of course to change your all_text() function so that it returns a string instead of writing to sys.stdout ie

def all_text():
    return "Line1\nLine2\nLine3"

If your real function actually does a lot of printing in different places and/or call functions which themselves print to stdout etc, making the "clean solution" impractical or too expensive, you can also hack around by redirecting sys.stdout to a StringIO and sending the collected values to add_paragraph , ie:

import sys
try:
   from io import StringIO # py3
except ImportError:
   from cStringIO import StringIO

def all_text():
     print("Line1\nLine2\nLine3")


def get_all_text():
    sys.stdout = buffer = StringIO
    try:
        all_text()
        return  buffer.getvalue()
    finally:
        sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__

document.add_paragraph(get_all_text())