Output

Gregor von Laszewski (laszewski@gmail.com)

Cloudmesh provides a number of convenient API’s to make the output easier or more fanciful.

These API’s include

• Console
• Banner
• Heading
• VERBOSE

Console

Print is the usual function to output to the terminal. However, often we like to have colored output that helps us in the notification to the user. For this reason, we have a simple Console class that has several built-in features. You can even switch and define your own color schemes.

from cloudmesh.common.console import Console

msg = "my message"
Console.ok(msg) # prins a green message
Console.error(msg) # prins a red message proceeded with ERROR
Console.msg(msg) # prins a regular black message

In case of the error message we also have convenient flags that allow us to include the traceback in the output.

Console.error(msg, prefix=True, traceflag=True)

The prefix can be switched on and off with the prefix flag, while the traceflag switches on and of if the trace should be set.

The verbosity of the output is controlled via variables that are stored in the ~/.cloudmesh directory.

from cloudmesh.common.variables import Variables

variables = Variables()

variables['debug'] = True
variables['trace'] = True
variables['verbose'] = 10

For more features, see API: Console

Banner

In case you need a banner you can do this with

from cloudmesh.common.util import banner

banner("my text")

For more features, see API: Banner

Heading

A particularly useful function is HEADING() which prints the method name.

from cloudmesh.common.util import HEADING

class Example(object):

    def doit(self):
        HEADING()
        print ("Hello")

The invocation of the HEADING() function doit prints a banner with the name information. The reason we did not do it as a decorator is that you can place the HEADING() function in an arbitrary location of the method body.

For more features, see API: Heading

VERBOSE

Note: VERBOSE is not supported in jupyter notebooks

VERBOSE is a very useful method allowing you to print a dictionary. Not only will it print the dict, but it will also provide you with the information in which file it is used and which line number. It will even print the name of the dict that you use in your code.

To use this you will have to enable the debugging methods for cloudmesh as discussed in sec. 1.1

from cloudmesh.common.debug import VERBOSE

m = {"key": "value"}
VERBOSE(m)

For more features, please see VERBOSE

Using print and pprint

In many cases, it may be sufficient to use print and pprint for debugging. However, as the code is big and you may forget where you placed print statements or the print statements may have been added by others, we recommend that you use the VERBOSE function. If you use print or pprint we recommend using a unique prefix, such as:

from pprint import pprint

d = {"sample": "value"}
print("MYDEBUG:")
pprint (d)

# or with print

print("MYDEBUG:", d)