Question

I am creating a small console app that needs a progress bar. Something like…

Conversion: 175/348 Seconds   |==========          |  50% 

My question is, how do you erase characters already printed to the console? When I reach the 51st percentage, I have to erase this line from the console and insert a new line. In my current solution, this is what happens…

Conversion: 175/348 Seconds   |==========          |  50% Conversion: 179/348 Seconds   |==========          |  52% Conversion: 183/348 Seconds   |==========          |  54% Conversion: 187/348 Seconds   |===========         |  56% 

Code I use is…

print 'Conversion: $converted_seconds/$total_time Seconds   $progress_bar  $converted_percentage%\n'; 

I am doing this in Linux using PHP(only I will use the app – so please excuse the language choice). So, the solution should work on the Linux platform – but if you have a solution that’s cross platform, that would be preferable.

Answer 1

I don’t think you need to apologize for the language choice. PHP is a great language for console applications.

Try this out:

<?php for( $i=0;$i<10;$i++){   print '$i \r';   sleep(1); } ?> 

The ‘\r’ will overwrite the line with the new text. To make a new line you can just use ‘\n’, but I’m guessing you already knew that.

Hope this helps! I know this works in Linux, but I don’t know if it works in Windows or other operating systems.