Note: This question is for informational purposes only. I am interested to see how deep into Python’s internals it is possible to go with this.

Not very long ago, a discussion began inside a certain question regarding whether the strings passed to print statements could be modified after/during the call to print has been made. For example, consider the function:

def print_something():
    print('This cat was scared.')

Now, when print is run, then the output to the terminal should display:

This dog was scared.

Notice the word “cat” has been replaced by the word “dog”. Something somewhere somehow was able to modify those internal buffers to change what was printed. Assume this is done without the original code author’s explicit permission (hence, hacking/hijacking).

This comment from the wise @abarnert, in particular, got me thinking:

There are a couple of ways to do that, but they’re all very ugly, and should never be done. The least ugly way is to probably replace the code object inside the function with one with a different co_consts list. Next is probably reaching into the C API to access the str’s internal buffer. […]

So, it looks like this is actually possible.

Here’s my naive way of approaching this problem:

>>> import inspect
>>> exec(inspect.getsource(print_something).replace('cat', 'dog'))
>>> print_something()
This dog was scared.

Of course, exec is bad, but that doesn’t really answer the question, because it does not actually modify anything during when/after print is called.

How would it be done as @abarnert has explained it?

First, there’s actually a much less hacky way. All we want to do is change what print prints, right?

_print = print
def print(*args, **kw):
    args = (arg.replace('cat', 'dog') if isinstance(arg, str) else arg
            for arg in args)
    _print(*args, **kw)

Or, similarly, you can monkeypatch sys.stdout instead of print.

Also, nothing wrong with the exec … getsource … idea. Well, of course there’s plenty wrong with it, but less than what follows here…

But if you do want to modify the function object’s code constants, we can do that.

If you really want to play around with code objects for real, you should use a library like bytecode (when it’s finished) or byteplay (until then, or for older Python versions) instead of doing it manually. Even for something this trivial, the CodeType initializer is a pain; if you actually need to do stuff like fixing up lnotab, only a lunatic would do that manually.

Also, it goes without saying that not all Python implementations use CPython-style code objects. This code will work in CPython 3.7, and probably all versions back to at least 2.2 with a few minor changes (and not the code-hacking stuff, but things like generator expressions), but it won’t work with any version of IronPython.

import types

def print_function():
    print ("This cat was scared.")

def main():
    # A function object is a wrapper around a code object, with
    # a bit of extra stuff like default values and closure cells.
    # See inspect module docs for more details.
    co = print_function.__code__
    # A code object is a wrapper around a string of bytecode, with a
    # whole bunch of extra stuff, including a list of constants used
    # by that bytecode. Again see inspect module docs. Anyway, inside
    # the bytecode for string (which you can read by typing
    # dis.dis(string) in your REPL), there's going to be an
    # instruction like LOAD_CONST 1 to load the string literal onto
    # the stack to pass to the print function, and that works by just
    # reading co.co_consts[1]. So, that's what we want to change.
    consts = tuple(c.replace("cat", "dog") if isinstance(c, str) else c
                   for c in co.co_consts)
    # Unfortunately, code objects are immutable, so we have to create
    # a new one, copying over everything except for co_consts, which
    # we'll replace. And the initializer has a zillion parameters.
    # Try help(types.CodeType) at the REPL to see the whole list.
    co = types.CodeType(
        co.co_argcount, co.co_kwonlyargcount, co.co_nlocals,
        co.co_stacksize, co.co_flags, co.co_code,
        consts, co.co_names, co.co_varnames, co.co_filename,
        co.co_name, co.co_firstlineno, co.co_lnotab,
        co.co_freevars, co.co_cellvars)
    print_function.__code__ = co
    print_function()

main()

What could go wrong with hacking up code objects? Mostly just segfaults, RuntimeErrors that eat up the whole stack, more normal RuntimeErrors that can be handled, or garbage values that will probably just raise a TypeError or AttributeError when you try to use them. For examples, try creating a code object with just a RETURN_VALUE with nothing on the stack (bytecode b'S\0' for 3.6+, b'S' before), or with an empty tuple for co_consts when there’s a LOAD_CONST 0 in the bytecode, or with varnames decremented by 1 so the highest LOAD_FAST actually loads a freevar/cellvar cell. For some real fun, if you get the lnotab wrong enough, your code will only segfault when run in the debugger.

Using bytecode or byteplay won’t protect you from all of those problems, but they do have some basic sanity checks, and nice helpers that let you do things like insert a chunk of code and let it worry about updating all offsets and labels so you can’t get it wrong, and so on. (Plus, they keep you from having to type in that ridiculous 6-line constructor, and having to debug the silly typos that come from doing so.)

Now on to #2.

I mentioned that code objects are immutable. And of course the consts are a tuple, so we can’t change that directly. And the thing in the const tuple is a string, which we also can’t change directly. That’s why I had to build a new string to build a new tuple to build a new code object.

But what if you could change a string directly?

Well, deep enough under the covers, everything is just a pointer to some C data, right? If you’re using CPython, there’s a C API to access the objects, and you can use ctypes to access that API from within Python itself, which is such a terrible idea that they put a pythonapi right there in the stdlib’s ctypes module. :) The most important trick you need to know is that id(x) is the actual pointer to x in memory (as an int).

Unfortunately, the C API for strings won’t let us safely get at the internal storage of an already-frozen string. So screw safely, let’s just read the header files and find that storage ourselves.

If you’re using CPython 3.4 – 3.7 (it’s different for older versions, and who knows for the future), a string literal from a module that’s made of pure ASCII is going to be stored using the compact ASCII format, which means the struct ends early and the buffer of ASCII bytes follows immediately in memory. This will break (as in probably segfault) if you put a non-ASCII character in the string, or certain kinds of non-literal strings, but you can read up on the other 4 ways to access the buffer for different kinds of strings.

To make things slightly easier, I’m using the superhackyinternals project off my GitHub. (It’s intentionally not pip-installable because you really shouldn’t be using this except to experiment with your local build of the interpreter and the like.)

import ctypes
import internals # https://github.com/abarnert/superhackyinternals/blob/master/internals.py

def print_function():
    print ("This cat was scared.")

def main():
    for c in print_function.__code__.co_consts:
        if isinstance(c, str):
            idx = c.find('cat')
            if idx != -1:
                # Too much to explain here; just guess and learn to
                # love the segfaults...
                p = internals.PyUnicodeObject.from_address(id(c))
                assert p.compact and p.ascii
                addr = id(c) + internals.PyUnicodeObject.utf8_length.offset
                buf = (ctypes.c_int8 * 3).from_address(addr + idx)
                buf[:3] = b'dog'

    print_function()

main()

If you want to play with this stuff, int is a whole lot simpler under the covers than str. And it’s a lot easier to guess what you can break by changing the value of 2 to 1, right? Actually, forget imagining, let’s just do it (using the types from superhackyinternals again):

>>> n = 2
>>> pn = PyLongObject.from_address(id(n))
>>> pn.ob_digit[0]
2
>>> pn.ob_digit[0] = 1
>>> 2
1
>>> n * 3
3
>>> i = 10
>>> while i < 40:
...     i *= 2
...     print(i)
10
10
10

… pretend that code box has an infinite-length scrollbar.

I tried the same thing in IPython, and the first time I tried to evaluate 2 at the prompt, it went into some kind of uninterruptable infinite loop. Presumably it’s using the number 2 for something in its REPL loop, while the stock interpreter isn’t?

Monkey-patch print

print is a builtin function so it will use the print function defined in the builtins module (or __builtin__ in Python 2). So whenever you want to modify or change the behavior of a builtin function you can simply reassign the name in that module.

This process is called monkey-patching.

# Store the real print function in another variable otherwise
# it will be inaccessible after being modified.
_print = print  

# Actual implementation of the new print
def custom_print(*args, **options):
    _print('custom print called')
    _print(*args, **options)

# Change the print function globally
import builtins
builtins.print = custom_print

After that every print call will go through custom_print, even if the print is in an external module.

However you don’t really want to print additional text, you want to change the text that is printed. One way to go about that is to replace it in the string that would be printed:

_print = print  

def custom_print(*args, **options):
    # Get the desired seperator or the default whitspace
    sep = options.pop('sep', ' ')
    # Create the final string
    printed_string = sep.join(args)
    # Modify the final string
    printed_string = printed_string.replace('cat', 'dog')
    # Call the default print function
    _print(printed_string, **options)

import builtins
builtins.print = custom_print

And indeed if you run:

>>> def print_something():
...     print('This cat was scared.')
>>> print_something()
This dog was scared.

Or if you write that to a file:

test_file.py

def print_something():
    print('This cat was scared.')

print_something()

and import it:

>>> import test_file
This dog was scared.
>>> test_file.print_something()
This dog was scared.

So it really works as intended.

However, in case you only temporarily want to monkey-patch print you could wrap this in a context-manager:

import builtins

class ChangePrint(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.old_print = print

    def __enter__(self):
        def custom_print(*args, **options):
            # Get the desired seperator or the default whitspace
            sep = options.pop('sep', ' ')
            # Create the final string
            printed_string = sep.join(args)
            # Modify the final string
            printed_string = printed_string.replace('cat', 'dog')
            # Call the default print function
            self.old_print(printed_string, **options)

        builtins.print = custom_print

    def __exit__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        builtins.print = self.old_print

So when you run that it depends on the context what is printed:

>>> with ChangePrint() as x:
...     test_file.print_something()
... 
This dog was scared.
>>> test_file.print_something()
This cat was scared.

So that’s how you could “hack” print by monkey-patching.

Modify the target instead of the print

If you look at the signature of print you’ll notice a file argument which is sys.stdout by default. Note that this is a dynamic default argument (it really looks up sys.stdout every time you call print) and not like normal default arguments in Python. So if you change sys.stdout print will actually print to the different target even more convenient that Python also provides a redirect_stdout function (from Python 3.4 on, but it’s easy to create an equivalent function for earlier Python versions).

The downside is that it won’t work for print statements that don’t print to sys.stdout and that creating your own stdout isn’t really straightforward.

import io
import sys

class CustomStdout(object):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.current_stdout = sys.stdout

    def write(self, string):
        self.current_stdout.write(string.replace('cat', 'dog'))

However this also works:

>>> import contextlib
>>> with contextlib.redirect_stdout(CustomStdout()):
...     test_file.print_something()
... 
This dog was scared.
>>> test_file.print_something()
This cat was scared.

Summary

Some of these points have already be mentioned by @abarnet but I wanted to explore these options in more detail. Especially how to modify it across modules (using builtins/__builtin__) and how to make that change only temporary (using contextmanagers).

A simple way to capture all output from a print function and then process it, is to change the output stream to something else, e.g. a file.

I’ll use a PHP naming conventions (ob_start, ob_get_contents,…)

from functools import partial
output_buffer = None
print_orig = print
def ob_start(fname="print.txt"):
    global print
    global output_buffer
    print = partial(print_orig, file=output_buffer)
    output_buffer = open(fname, 'w')
def ob_end():
    global output_buffer
    close(output_buffer)
    print = print_orig
def ob_get_contents(fname="print.txt"):
    return open(fname, 'r').read()

Usage:

print ("Hi John")
ob_start()
print ("Hi John")
ob_end()
print (ob_get_contents().replace("Hi", "Bye"))

Would print

Hi John Bye John

Let’s combine this with frame introspection!

import sys

_print = print

def print(*args, **kw):
    frame = sys._getframe(1)
    _print(frame.f_code.co_name)
    _print(*args, **kw)

def greetly(name, greeting = "Hi")
    print(f"{greeting}, {name}!")

class Greeter:
    def __init__(self, greeting = "Hi"):
        self.greeting = greeting
    def greet(self, name):
        print(f"{self.greeting}, {name}!")

You’ll find this trick prefaces every greeting with the calling function or method. This might be very useful for logging or debugging; especially as it lets you “hijack” print statements in third party code.