Question

Is it possible to modify text I printed to the terminal without clearing the screen?

For instance, if I’m showing progress of something in percentage, can I modify that percentage without having to clear the screen and printing again? I’m looking for a cross-platform way, if there is one.

Talking C++.

thanks

Answer 1

There are a number of ways to do this, and depending on how much effort you want to put into it, you can do a lot of cool things with ascii text in a terminal window.

1. Advanced: ncurses library

2. Easier: ansi escape characters with printf or cout

3. Easiest: As others have said, simply use \r for a carriage return without a linefeed.

Edit: example of using the ESC sequence to go back two characters:

#include <iostream>
#define ESC char(0x1B)

int main(){
  std::cout << "This will overwrite 'rs' in the following: characters" << ESC << "[2D" << "xx" << std::endl;
  return 0;
}