In python, how to capture the stdout from a c++ shared library to a variable

Question

For some other reasons, the c++ shared library I used outputs some texts to standard output. In python, I want to capture the output and save to a variable.

Answer 1

Thanks to the nice answer by Adam, I was able to get this working. His solution didn't quite work for my case, since I needed to capture text, restore, and capture text again many times, so I had to make some pretty big changes. Also, I wanted to get this to work for sys.stderr as well (with the potential for other streams).

So, here is the solution I ended up using (with or without threading):

Code

import os
import sys
import threading
import time


class OutputGrabber(object):
    """
    Class used to grab standard output or another stream.
    """
    escape_char = "\b"

    def __init__(self, stream=None, threaded=False):
        self.origstream = stream
        self.threaded = threaded
        if self.origstream is None:
            self.origstream = sys.stdout
        self.origstreamfd = self.origstream.fileno()
        self.capturedtext = ""
        # Create a pipe so the stream can be captured:
        self.pipe_out, self.pipe_in = os.pipe()

    def __enter__(self):
        self.start()
        return self

    def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
        self.stop()

    def start(self):
        """
        Start capturing the stream data.
        """
        self.capturedtext = ""
        # Save a copy of the stream:
        self.streamfd = os.dup(self.origstreamfd)
        # Replace the original stream with our write pipe:
        os.dup2(self.pipe_in, self.origstreamfd)
        if self.threaded:
            # Start thread that will read the stream:
            self.workerThread = threading.Thread(target=self.readOutput)
            self.workerThread.start()
            # Make sure that the thread is running and os.read() has executed:
            time.sleep(0.01)

    def stop(self):
        """
        Stop capturing the stream data and save the text in `capturedtext`.
        """
        # Print the escape character to make the readOutput method stop:
        self.origstream.write(self.escape_char)
        # Flush the stream to make sure all our data goes in before
        # the escape character:
        self.origstream.flush()
        if self.threaded:
            # wait until the thread finishes so we are sure that
            # we have until the last character:
            self.workerThread.join()
        else:
            self.readOutput()
        # Close the pipe:
        os.close(self.pipe_in)
        os.close(self.pipe_out)
        # Restore the original stream:
        os.dup2(self.streamfd, self.origstreamfd)
        # Close the duplicate stream:
        os.close(self.streamfd)

    def readOutput(self):
        """
        Read the stream data (one byte at a time)
        and save the text in `capturedtext`.
        """
        while True:
            char = os.read(self.pipe_out, 1)
            if not char or self.escape_char in char:
                break
            self.capturedtext += char

Usage

with sys.stdout, the default:

out = OutputGrabber()
out.start()
library.method(*args) # Call your code here
out.stop()
# Compare the output to the expected value:
# comparisonMethod(out.capturedtext, expectedtext)

with sys.stderr:

out = OutputGrabber(sys.stderr)
out.start()
library.method(*args) # Call your code here
out.stop()
# Compare the output to the expected value:
# comparisonMethod(out.capturedtext, expectedtext)

in a with block:

out = OutputGrabber()
with out:
    library.method(*args) # Call your code here
# Compare the output to the expected value:
# comparisonMethod(out.capturedtext, expectedtext)

Tested on Windows 7 with Python 2.7.6 and Ubuntu 12.04 with Python 2.7.6.

To work in Python 3, change char = os.read(self.pipe_out,1)
to char = os.read(self.pipe_out,1).decode(self.origstream.encoding).