I had the same idea as Frédéric, but i wrote a context manager to handle replacing stdout:
import sys from io import StringIO import contextlib @contextlib.contextmanager def stdoutIO(stdout=None): old = sys.stdout if stdout is None: stdout = StringIO() sys.stdout = stdout yield stdout sys.stdout = old code = """ i = [0,1,2] for j in i : print j """ with stdoutIO() as s: exec(code) print("out:", s.getvalue()) 