Sometimes it is helpful to capture stdout/stderr. I usually use this when writing tests to make assertions about terminal output or just suppress it when the tests are running. Normally I would do a little switcheroo like this to manually manipulate sys.stdout:

from io import StringIO 
import sys

sys.stdout = StringIO()
print('foobar')
val = sys.stdout.getvalue()
sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__

but today I leaned about python's contextlib.redirect_stdout and contextlib.redirect_stderr. These standard library context managers provide a built-in abstraction over this operation:

from io import StringIO 
from contextlib import redirect_stdout

with StringIO() as buf, redirect_stdout(buf):
    print('foobar')
    val = buf.getvalue()