pythonprinting

Unprint a line on the console in Python?

Is it possible to manipulate lines of text that have already been printed to the console?

For example,

import time
for k in range(1,100):
     print(str(k)+"/"+"100")
     time.sleep(0.03)
     #>> Clear the most recent line printed to the console
print("ready or not here I come!")

I've seen some things for using custom DOS consoles under Windows, but I would really like something that works on the command_line like does print without any additional canvases.

Does this exist? If it doesn’t, why not?

P.S.: I was trying to use curses, and it was causing problems with my command line behaviour outside of Python. (After erroring out of a Python script with curses in it, my Bash shell stopped printing newline -unacceptable- ).

Solution

  • What you're looking for is:

    print("{}/100".format(k), "\r", end="")

    \r is carriage return, which returns the cursor to the beginning of the line. In effect, whatever is printed will overwrite the previous printed text. end="" is to prevent \n after printing (to stay on the same line).

    A simpler form as suggested by sonrad10 in the comments:

    print("{}/100".format(k), end="\r")

    Here, we're simply replacing the end character with \r instead of \n.

    In Python 2, the same can be achieved with:

    print "{}/100".format(k), "\r",