I'm running Python 2.4 in a game engine and I want to be able to turn off all prints if needed. For example I'd like to have the prints on for a debug build, and then turned off for a release build. It's also imperative that it's as transparent as possible.

My solution to this in the C code of the engine is having the printf function inside a vararg macro, and defining that to do nothing in a release build.

This is my current solution:

DebugPrints = True
def PRINT (*args):
    global DebugPrints
    if DebugPrints:
        string = ""
        for arg in args:
            string += " " + str(arg)
        print string

It makes it easy to toggle print outs, but there is possibly a better way to format the string. My main issue is that this is actually adding a lot more function calls to the program.

I'm wondering if there is anything you can do to how the print keyword works?

python printing
Edit
Report