Can I redirect the stdout in python into some sort of string buffer?

from cStringIO import StringIO # Python3 use: from io import StringIO
import sys

old_stdout = sys.stdout
sys.stdout = mystdout = StringIO()

# blah blah lots of code ...

sys.stdout = old_stdout

# examine mystdout.getvalue()

There is contextlib.redirect_stdout() function in Python 3.4:

import io
from contextlib import redirect_stdout

with io.StringIO() as buf, redirect_stdout(buf):
    print('redirected')
    output = buf.getvalue()

Here's code example that shows how to implement it on older Python versions.

Just to add to Ned's answer above: you can use this to redirect output to any object that implements a write(str) method.

This can be used to good effect to "catch" stdout output in a GUI application.

Here's a silly example in PyQt:

import sys
from PyQt4 import QtGui

class OutputWindow(QtGui.QPlainTextEdit):
    def write(self, txt):
        self.appendPlainText(str(txt))

app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
out = OutputWindow()
sys.stdout=out
out.show()
print "hello world !"