Trouble printing answer to question but find nothing wrong in script?

I am making a fun little project with some useful functions and I was creating an Ask function where you enter what you want to ask and it gets input from the user and sets the variable answer to the answer the user gives. My only problem is I am printing the answer outside of the function but for some reason it prints nothing.

answer = " "   # set empty in the start
def ask(question):
    answer = input(question) # sets the answer to the user's input
ask("how are you ")
print(answer)  # ends up printing nothing.

>Solution :

You must print answer:

1. inside of ask function,
   or
2. return answer, catch it and then print it

answer = " "   # set empty in the start
def ask(question):
    answer = input(question)
    return answer
    
answer = ask("how are you ")
print(answer)

or one line:

print(ask("how are you "))