The print() function writes, i.e., “prints”, a string in the console. The return statement causes your function to exit and hand back a value to its caller. The point of functions in general is to take in inputs and return something. The return statement is used when a function is ready to return a value to its caller.
For example, here’s a function utilizing both print() and return:
def foo():
print("hello from inside of foo")
return 1
Now you can run code that calls foo, like so:
if __name__ == '__main__':
print("going to call foo")
x = foo()
print("called foo")
print("foo returned " + str(x))
If you run this as a script (e.g. a .py file) as opposed to in the Python interpreter, you will get the following output:
going to call foo hello from inside foo called foo foo returned 1
I hope this makes it clearer. The interpreter writes return values to the console so I can see why somebody could be confused.
Here’s another example from the interpreter that demonstrates that:
>>> def foo():
... print("hello from within foo")
... return 1
...
>>> foo()
hello from within foo
1
>>> def bar():
... return 10 * foo()
...
>>> bar()
hello from within foo
10
You can see that when foo() is called from bar(), 1 isn’t written to the console. Instead it is used to calculate the value returned from bar().
print() is a function that causes a side effect (it writes a string in the console), but execution resumes with the next statement. return causes the function to stop executing and hand a value back to whatever called it.