How to implement the --verbose or -v option into a script?

Question

I know the --verbose or -v from several tools and I\'d like to implement this into some of my own scripts and tools.

I thought of placing:<

Answer 1

@kindall's solution does not work with my Python version 3.5. @styles correctly states in his comment that the reason is the additional optional keywords argument. Hence my slightly refined version for Python 3 looks like this:

if VERBOSE:
    def verboseprint(*args, **kwargs):
        print(*args, **kwargs)
else:
    verboseprint = lambda *a, **k: None # do-nothing function