Python Academy · Lesson

Capturing Output

Read stdout and stderr.

Capturing stdout

To read what a command prints, pass capture_output=True. The text appears in the result's stdout attribute.

import subprocess

cp = subprocess.run(['echo', 'hello'], capture_output=True)
print(cp.stdout)

By default output is bytes. Pass text=True to get decoded strings instead, which is usually what you want.

import subprocess

cp = subprocess.run(['echo', 'hello'], capture_output=True, text=True)
print(repr(cp.stdout))