Question

I’m wondering how I could create one of those nifty console counters in Python as in certain C/C++-programs.

I’ve got a loop doing things and the current output is along the lines of:

Doing thing 0
Doing thing 1
Doing thing 2
...

what would be neater would be to just have the last line update;

X things done.

I’ve seen this in a number of console programs and am wondering if/how I’d do this in Python.

Answer 1

An easy solution is just writing "\r" before the string and not adding a newline; if the string never gets shorter this is sufficient…

sys.stdout.write("\rDoing thing %i" % i)
sys.stdout.flush()

Slightly more sophisticated is a progress bar… this is something I am using:

def start_progress(title):
    global progress_x
    sys.stdout.write(title + ": [" + "-"*40 + "]" + chr(8)*41)
    sys.stdout.flush()
    progress_x = 0

def progress(x):
    global progress_x
    x = int(x * 40 // 100)
    sys.stdout.write("#" * (x - progress_x))
    sys.stdout.flush()
    progress_x = x

def end_progress():
    sys.stdout.write("#" * (40 - progress_x) + "]\n")
    sys.stdout.flush()

You call start_progress passing the description of the operation, then progress(x) where x is the percentage and finally end_progress()