Print

.print (Publishers.Print) writes to the console a string message describing everything that passes through it in either direction: a subscription, demand, or cancel message passing upstream, or a value or completion passing downstream.

For example, here’s a very simple pipeline:

Just(1)
    .print()

When we subscribe to that pipeline, it writes to the console:

receive subscription: (Just)
request unlimited
receive value: (1)
receive finished

Clearly, .print can be extremely useful for testing your pipeline and getting a record of what flows through it. On the other hand, you can end up with a lot of information, especially if you’ve got more than one .print operator. To help you with that problem, this operator takes an optional string parameter that will be prefixed to each item of output. Judicious use of these strings will help you straighten out what’s going on throughout the pipeline.

For example, here’s a heavily instrumented pipeline:

[1].publisher
    .print()
    .flatMap(maxPublishers: .max(1)) {
        Just($0)
        .print()
    }
    .print()
    .sink(receiveCompletion: {print($0)})
        {print($0)}
        .store(in:&self.storage)

The output in the console is:

receive subscription: (FlatMap)
request unlimited
receive subscription: ([1])
request max: (1)
receive value: (1)
receive subscription: (Just)
request unlimited
receive value: (1)
receive value: (1)
1
receive finished
request max: (1)
receive finished
receive finished
finished

That’s totally incomprehensible. By adding prefix strings, we can completely clarify what’s going on; I’ll add prefix strings to the .sink output too:

[1].publisher
    .print("before")
    .flatMap(maxPublishers: .max(1)) {
        Just($0)
        .print("inside")
    }
    .print("after")
    .sink(receiveCompletion: {print("DONE:", $0)})
        {print("VAL:",$0)}
        .store(in:&self.storage)

The output is:

after: receive subscription: (FlatMap)
after: request unlimited
before: receive subscription: ([1])
before: request max: (1)
before: receive value: (1)
inside: receive subscription: (Just)
inside: request unlimited
inside: receive value: (1)
after: receive value: (1)
VAL: 1
inside: receive finished
before: request max: (1)
before: receive finished
after: receive finished
DONE: finished

That’s better! Now it doesn’t take much study to understand just how that pipeline works.

(The .print operator also takes an optional to: parameter specifying a TextOutputString to write to, but I have not been able to get it to behave correctly, so I’m not going to talk about it.)

The name .print is unfortunate, because it can overshadow the global print function from the Swift library. If that causes trouble for you, disambiguate by writing the latter as Swift.print.