I don’t understand why you would use return instead of print

April 25, 2024

I am currently working on defining commands and the service I’m using wants me to use return in the command instead of print to get practice with it. I was wondering what the difference between the two and some benefits of each of the two.

>Solution :

Printing in a function is used to display output, such as

def greet(name):
    print(f"Hi, {name}!")

greet("Person")  # Prints "Hi, Person!"

While returning can be used to assign a variable used in the function into a variable outside of the function, such as

def add(a, b):
    return a + b

result = add(4, 5)
print(result)  # Prints 9

Basically, use return when you want to compute a value within the function and send it back to the main program to be used, and use print when you want to display information without affecting the function’s return value.