How to comment/remove all print statements from Python codebase?

Question

I have this regex to remove all print statements from a python codebase:

for f in $(find . -name '*.py') ;
do
egrep -v '^[ \t]print ' $f > $f.new
mv $f.new $f
done

but it doesn't really work..

find . -name '*.py' | xargs egrep '^[ \t]*print'

Still prints out the print statements from my code.. :(

However, I want to modify this to comment out all the lines that have print statements in them(so they arent completely gone from the codebase).

How can I efficiently do this? better still is there an automated way to convert everything to logging framework?

[ \t] matches exactly one whitespace. You want [ \t]*. — Valentin Lorentz
– Valentin Lorentz, Commented Jun 3, 2014 at 7:26
2.x currently. i considered using the 2to3 tool --fix=print but that just converts it into a print fuction and causes a bunch of errors in the codebase also.. — Wingston Sharon
– Wingston Sharon, Commented Jun 3, 2014 at 7:34

Matt · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-15 11:44:50Z

5

Sed is the tool for the job.

find . -name '*.py' -exec sed -ri "s/(^\s*)(print.*$)/#\1\2/g" {} \;

For Mac OS X or BSD:

find . -name '*.py' -exec sed -Ei "s/\(^[[:space:]]*\)\(print.*$\)/#\1\2/g" {} \;

answered Jun 3, 2014 at 7:35

Matt

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4 Comments

give me an error :: sed: illegal option -- r if i remove -r it give me error : sed: 1: "./scripts/update_hosts.py": invalid command code .

ah, replace the r with E in your case.

if i want to remove print statements instead of comment out?

@NaveenAgarwal find . -name '*.py' -exec sed -ri "s/(^\s*)(print.*$)//g" {} \;