Save what was printed on the screen

Question

Is there any way to save into a variable what print sends to the screen, so I will be able to print it back after erasing the screen?

Answer 1

Don't know why this question is being downvoted. Anyway, an answer from Raymond Hettinger on Twitter, utilises contextlib.redirect_stdout():

with open('help.txt', 'w') as f:
    with contextlib.redirect_stdout(f):
        help(pow)

Although, in this case the output is being redirected into a file, rather than a variable and is Python3, not 2.7.

From the docs, to capture that in a variable:

For example, the output of help() normally is sent to sys.stdout. You can capture that output in a string by redirecting the output to an io.StringIO object:

f = io.StringIO()
with redirect_stdout(f):
    help(pow)
s = f.getvalue()

This answer on SO shows another way to do it, and in Python2: