pythonprintingtext-based

How to print one character at a time but maintain print function -- Python


I am developing a text-based game on Python and I wanted to have the effect where letters appear one at a time. It has to be a function because I wanted the effect to apply to almost all printed strings. I am using the code seen below, which I got from here, and it works fine for this simple example, but the problem is that it does not recognize characters like apostrophes or hyphens and it does not retain the line breaks I have already set up, so it does not work for longer amounts of text.

Is there a way to get around this? If I could have it at least recognize more characters and have it print on a new line every time I use a new slow() function, that would be great.

import sys, time    
def slow(text, delay=0.02):
    for c in text:
        sys.stdout.write(c)
        sys.stdout.flush()
        time.sleep(delay)
    print
slow("Hello!")

Thank you and apologize for the beginner question.


Solution

  • This can all be done with print()

    It is a requirement that a newline is output after the individual characters. However, the input string may already end with '\n' so don't repeat it.

    from sys import stdout
    from time import sleep 
    
    def slow(text, delay=0.1):
        if text: # only process if the string is not zero length
            for c in text:
                print(c, end='', flush=True)
                sleep(delay)
            if text[-1] != '\n':
                print()
    
    slow("Hello world!")