Redirecting stdout to "nothing" in python

Question

Cross-platform:

import os
import sys
f = open(os.devnull, 'w')
sys.stdout = f

On Windows:

f = open('nul', 'w')
sys.stdout = f

On Linux:

f = open('/dev/null', 'w')
sys.stdout = f

A nice way to do this is to create a small context processor that you wrap your prints in. You then just use is in a with-statement to silence all output.

Python 2:

import os
import sys
from contextlib import contextmanager

@contextmanager
def silence_stdout():
    old_target = sys.stdout
    try:
        with open(os.devnull, "w") as new_target:
            sys.stdout = new_target
            yield new_target
    finally:
        sys.stdout = old_target

with silence_stdout():
    print("will not print")

print("this will print")

Python 3.4+:

Python 3.4 has a context processor like this built-in, so you can simply use contextlib like this:

import contextlib

with contextlib.redirect_stdout(None):
    print("will not print")

print("this will print")

---

If the code you want to surpress writes directly to sys.stdout using None as redirect target won't work. Instead you can use:

import contextlib
import sys
import os

with contextlib.redirect_stdout(open(os.devnull, 'w')):
    sys.stdout.write("will not print")

sys.stdout.write("this will print")

---

If your code writes to stderr instead of stdout, you can use contextlib.redirect_stderr instead of redirect_stdout.

---

Running this code only prints the second line of output, not the first:

$ python test.py
this will print

This works cross-platform (Windows + Linux + Mac OSX), and is cleaner than the ones other answers imho.

If you're in python 3.4 or higher, there's a simple and safe solution using the standard library:

import contextlib

with contextlib.redirect_stdout(None):
  print("This won't print!")

(at least on my system) it appears that writing to os.devnull is about 5x faster than writing to a DontPrint class, i.e.

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys
import datetime

ITER = 10000000
def printlots(out, it, st="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890"):
   temp = sys.stdout
   sys.stdout = out
   i = 0
   start_t = datetime.datetime.now()
   while i < it:
      print st
      i = i+1
   end_t = datetime.datetime.now()
   sys.stdout = temp
   print out, "\n   took", end_t - start_t, "for", it, "iterations"

class devnull():
   def write(*args):
      pass


printlots(open(os.devnull, 'wb'), ITER)
printlots(devnull(), ITER)

gave the following output:

<open file '/dev/null', mode 'wb' at 0x7f2b747044b0> 
   took 0:00:02.074853 for 10000000 iterations
<__main__.devnull instance at 0x7f2b746bae18> 
   took 0:00:09.933056 for 10000000 iterations

If you're in a Unix environment (Linux included), you can redirect output to /dev/null:

python myprogram.py > /dev/null

And for Windows:

python myprogram.py > nul