Feature idea: with automatic printing, also allow to *not* print one result

[Splines]

With print_auto=True in the initial config, every result is printed to the console by default. What if we want this except for one variable. Currently, one would have to not use the automatic printing and instead call print() on every single other result. Instead, provide something along these lines:

wiz.res("my variable", 3.14, 0.02, "\m").dont_print()

[Splines]

print twice issue

idea: delete console line

[Splines]

idea: .print(False) à la:

def printtest(will_print=True):
    if will_print:
        print("will print")
    else:
        print("won't print")


printtest(False)

[paul019]

Helpful

[paul019]

idea: delete console line

After a bit of research, we cannot realize this for Jupyter notebooks.

[paul019]

The only viable alternative that comes to my mind is:

wiz.res("my variable", 3.14, 0.02, "\m", print=false)

@Splines What do you think?

[Splines]

I'm currently investigating different options to achieve this.

• We could use __del__ but that's too tricky and we don't want to rely on implementation details of CPython. It's also only called when the garbage collector comes around, and NOT (necessarily) when the last reference to an object goes out of scope. It's also not recommended for various other reasons.
• Another way would be to use a context manager (you might know the with one used to open a file). But the syntax becomes way too bloated then.

I thought about it and there's no other way I see. Your alternative is fine with me, even even though it creates a slight asymetry as printing is done via .print() while disallowing of printing is done via a keyword argument.

• Note that the .print() method will have to check if res() has already printed. For this, we could pass that info in as argument to the PrintableResult when it is constructed from within the res method. E.g. have a param called should_print. The constructor of PrintableResult could even handle the auto print in that case (instead of res()).
• For wiz.res(..., print=False), I'd except the result to not be printed no matter what print_auto is set to.
• For wiz.res(..., print=False).print(), I'd expect the result to be printed no matter what print_auto is set to.
• For wiz.res(..., print=True), I'd also expect the result to be printed no matter what print_auto is set to.
• The cases beforehand summarized: print_auto < print=False < .print() or print=True
• In any case, a result should only be printed once at most.

Please add respective tests for every case. This might be a good example where it can be beneficial to write the tests first 😅 (maybe see that as an opportunity to try that out at least once in your life). To access the output from a test function, see this in Pytest.