TL;DR

A quick-and-dirty way to capture STDOUT in Perl code.

Sometimes you might have a section of code that prints stuff out to STDOUT and you wonder… why you didn’t put all the stuff in a variable that you can later decide to print or use otherwise.

This is a proof-of-concept of how to do this in a quick and rather dirty way:

Lines 9 through 14 are executed in a separate scope, which allows us to localize STDOUT (line 10) and avoid messing up with the STDOUT in the outer scope (e.g. at lines 15 and 17).

At this point, it suffices to open STDOUT to send stuff to the variable (line 11) and we are done, prints in the Perl code from now on will go to our string (lines 12 and 13).

Example run:

$ perl qnd-capture.pl 
hello, this is shown immediately
grabbed: <in the middle...>
farewell, this is shown immediately

There are a lot of restrictions:

• might require some tweaking with previous versions of perl
• does not capture output from sub-processes
• I have no clue on how this works with XS code

but I guess it’s fair for a quick-and-dirty solution!