The sounds of (Python) Silence

Posted on Thu 02 January 2014 in blog

After a long vacation with my children, I’ve been meditating on the virtues of silence.

Python is a glorious toybox bursting with fun gadgets to delight TA’s near and far. You can easily use it to stuff anything from database access to a serial port controller into your copy of Maya, which is a always fun (and occasionally useful). However the plethora of Python libraries out there does bring with it a minor annoyance - if you grab something cool off the cheeseshop you don’t know exactly how the author wants to communicate with users. All too often you incorporate something useful into your Maya and suddenly your users have endless reams of debug printouts in their script listener — info that might make sense to a coder or a sysadmin but which is just noise (or worse, slightly scary) for your artists.

If you’re suffering from overly verbose external modules, you can get a little peace and quiet with this little snippet. The Silencer class is just a simple context manager that hijacks sys.stdout and sys.stderr into a pair of StringIO’s that will just silently swallow any printouts that would otherwise go to the listener. 

import sys
from StringIO import StringIO

class SilencedError ( Exception ):
    pass

class Silencer( object ):
    '''
    suppress stdout and stderr

    stdout and stderr are redirected into StringIOs.  At exit their contents are dumped into the string fields 'out' and 'error'

    Typically use this via the with statement:

    For example::

        with Silencer() as fred:
            print stuff
        result = fred.out

    note that if you use a silencer to close down output from the logging module, you should call logging.shutdown() in the silencer with block
    '''

    def __init__( self, enabled=True ):
        self.oldstdout = sys.stdout
        self.oldstderr = sys.stderr
        self._outhandle = None
        self._errhandle = None
        self.out = ""
        self.err = ""
        self.enabled = enabled

    def __enter__ ( self ):
        if self.enabled:
            self.oldstdout = sys.stdout
            self.oldstderr = sys.stderr
            sys.stdout = self._outhandle = StringIO()
            sys.stderr = self._errhandle = StringIO()
            self._was_entered = True
            return self
        else:
            self._was_entered = False

    def _restore( self ):
        if self._was_entered:
            self.out = self._outhandle.getvalue()
            self.err = self._errhandle.getvalue()
            sys.stdout = self.oldstdout
            sys.stderr = self.oldstderr
            self._outhandle.close()
            self._errhandle.close()
            self._outhandle = self._errhandle = None

    def __exit__( self, type, value, tb ):
        se = None
        try:
            if type:
                se = SilencedError( type, value, tb )
        except:
            pass
        finally:
            self._restore()
            if se: raise se

If you actually need to look at the spew you can just look at the contents of the out and error fields of the Silencer. More commonly though you’ll just want to wrap a particularly verbose bit of code in a with… as block to shut it up. You’ll also get the standard context manager behavior: an automatic restore in the event of an exception, etc.

programming maya python