Question

To implement a status bar like below:

[==========                ]  45%
[================          ]  60%
[==========================] 100%

I want to this to be printed out to stdout, and keep refreshing it, not print to another line. How to do this?

Answer 1

There’s a Python module that you can get from PyPI called progressbar that implements such functionality. If you don’t mind adding a dependency, it’s a good solution. Otherwise, go with one of the other answers.

A simple example of how to use it:

import progressbar
from time import sleep
bar = progressbar.ProgressBar(maxval=20, \
    widgets=[progressbar.Bar('=', '[', ']'), ' ', progressbar.Percentage()])
bar.start()
for i in xrange(20):
    bar.update(i+1)
    sleep(0.1)
bar.finish()

To install it, you can use easy_install progressbar, or pip install progressbar if you prefer pip.