import rpy quietly

Question

My question is analogous to this one but in the context of importing R to Python via RPy. Specifically, when I run

from rpy import *

at the beginning of my python script, there is a chunk of message dumped to the screen (or output device), starting with

Parsing output:  R version 2.13.2 (2011-09-30)
Copyright (C) 2011 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
... ...

I wanted to implement the quiet_require from here but don't see how it fits in the context of importing all modules.

I know this is possible because the same program running on another box doesn't output any message.

UPDATE: this does not have to be solved within Python. If I can somehow tweak a variable on the R side to allow all invocations to be quiet, that works too. I just don't know how to do that.

Unrelated to your actual question, but it using `from package import *` is highly discouraged as it pollutes the global namespace. If you don't want to type rpy all the time, you can shorten it with `import rpy as R`. — Wilduck, Dec 19 '11 at 17:06
May I ask why can't you use `rpy2` directly instead of `rpy`? — jcollado, Dec 19 '11 at 19:35
@jcollado, I don't have full control on what gets installed on that box. — Zhang18, Jan 25 '12 at 22:24

reclosedev · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-26T15:54:38.397

8

Here is simple but not beatiful hack:

# define somewhere following:
import sys
import os
from contextlib import contextmanager

@contextmanager
def quiet():
    sys.stdout = sys.stderr = open(os.devnull, "w")
    try:
        yield
    finally:
        sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__
        sys.stderr = sys.__stderr__


# use it    
with quiet(): 
    # all is quiet in this scope
    import this  # just for testing
    from rpy import *  # or whatever you want
# and this will print something
import something_that_prints

edit: changed code as advised @jdi and @jcollado.

edited Jan 26 '12 at 15:54

answered Dec 19 '11 at 17:30

reclosedev

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1

Could DummyFile() also be replaced with: `open(os.devnull, "w")` ? I like this contextmanager approach BTW – jdi Dec 19 '11 at 17:33
1

You can find similar solutions [here](http://stackoverflow.com/q/8522689/183066). There are some changes that would make the code even better in my opinion: using `os.devnull` and using `sys.__stderr__` and `sys.__stdout__` to get the original `sys.stderr` and `sys.stdout` (no need to keep the values). – jcollado Dec 19 '11 at 17:34
@jdi, jcollado, i like your advices. Added improvements to code. – reclosedev Dec 19 '11 at 17:58

import rpy quietly

1 Answers1