Bring your towel and join one of the fastest growing data communities. Welcome to our second-generation open source orchestration platform, a completely rethought approach to dataflow automation.

Prefect Community

I have a question about the task decorator
```@task
def get_file_name(table):
    file_name = f'bpi/{table}/-000'
    return file_name

with Flow("write to s3") as flow:
    exports = ['email_acquisitions', 'new_list_acquisitions', 'revenue', 'segmentation']
    for export in exports:
        file_name = get_file_name(export)
        print(file_name)```
I was trying to write a function that does some string manipulation to get a s3 path (this is simplified ^) and when I add the @task decorator, `file_name` = &lt;Task: get_file_name&gt;, when I just want it to return the string produced. Am i doing something in a non-prefect way?

Hi <@U011C0EDWQP> - your code should be doing what you hope; the difference is that your task calls are not evaluated at script runtime but instead are used to create the metadata for your flow. Since `print` is evaluated at script runtime, it's outputting the task method instead of the task evaluation. If you modify your code like this:
```@task
def get_file_name(table):
    file_name = f'bpi/{table}/-000'
    return file_name

@task
def print_file_name(file):
    print(file)

with Flow("write to s3") as flow:
    exports = ['email_acquisitions', 'new_list_acquisitions', 'revenue', 'segmentation']
    for export in exports:
        file_name = get_file_name(export)
        print_file_name(file_name)

flow.run()```
you'll be able to see what you're expecting

When moving to a non-development phase, you'll also want to take a look at <https://docs.prefect.io/core/concepts/logging.html#logging-configuration|Prefect Loggers>, since `print` won't show up in your logs in Cloud/Server :slightly_smiling_face:

My goal isn’t actually to print the file, i was just using it to debug, but good rec on loggers.

The problem I’m having is trying to use the string downstream and still receiving it as a task object.

```@task
def read_s3(file,bucket_name, s3):
    obj = s3.Object(bucket_name, file_name)
    body = obj.get()['Body'].read()```
yields `Invalid type for parameter Key, value: &lt;Task: get_file_name&gt;, type: &lt;class 'prefect.tasks.core.function.FunctionTask'&gt;, valid types: &lt;class 'str'&gt;`

oh! i'm sorry, i completely ignored the rest of your code. you'll want to map over that list instead of using a for loop in the flow context:
```@task
def get_file_name(table):
    file_name = f'bpi/{table}/-000'
    return file_name

@task
def print_file_name(file):
    print(file)

@task export_list():
    return ['email_acquisitions', 'new_list_acquisitions', 'revenue', 'segmentation']

with Flow("write to s3") as flow:
    file_name = get_file_name.map(export_list)
    print_file_name.map(file_name)
    
flow.run()```