"Star" Wars

May the code be with you ;)

The other day I was trying to “print-debug” a piece of Python code. Well, I know that you are looking at me with a frown and telling me - “Use pdb or similar man! At least use logging.” I agree! I agree!! But, can you deny the fact the you have also plunged into the pool of guilty pleasure of simply throwing around some good’ol “print” here and there in your code, more often than you are ready to admit? :D

Long story short, I ended up having a lot of prints and things were not looking rosy. Then suddenly, a realization came, “Can I customize print?”.

It was a fun 15 minutes, working with that. And I am sharing it with you.

So the first version I came up with was looking something like the following

import builtins


def print(*args, **kwargs):
    fillers = "*"
    
    builtins.print(fillers * 10)
    builtins.print(*args, **kwargs)
    builtins.print(fillers * 10)

When used, it will do something like this

print("My name")
>>>
**********
My name
**********

That is nice and good, but can we change those stars to any other characters that we like? such as “=” or “+”. I was not comfortable to pass on custom kwargs to the built-in print, so it was obvious that I will need to delete that before. My solution looked like this

import builtins


def print(*args, **kwargs):
    fillers = "*"
    if kwargs.get("fillers"):
        fillers = kwargs.get("fillers")
        del(kwargs['fillers'])
    
    builtins.print(fillers * 10)
    builtins.print(*args, **kwargs)
    builtins.print(fillers * 10)

And this I can use like the following

print("My name", fillers="=")
>>>
==========
My name
==========

Pretty neat, right? and fun also.

We will look more inside “builtins” soon again. Until then, Au Revoir

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