Text Progress Bar in the Console

Question

Is there a good way to do the following?

I wrote a simple console app to upload and download files from an FTP server using the ftplib.

Each time some data chunks are downloaded, I want to update a text progress bar, even if it's just a number.

But I don't want to erase all the text that's been printed to the console. (Doing a "clear" and then printing the updated percentage.)

Thanks for any suggestions. New to python so even less of a clue on what to do. :P

Answer 1

Write a \r to the console. That is a "carriage return" which causes all text after it to be echoed at the beginning of the line. Something like:

def update_progress(progress):
    print '\r[{0}] {1}%'.format('#'*(progress/10), progress)

which will give you something like: [ ########## ] 100%

Answer 2

Here's a nice example of a progressbar written in Python: http://nadiana.com/animated-terminal-progress-bar-in-python

But if you want to write it yourself. You could use the curses module to make things easier :)

[edit] Perhaps easier is not the word for curses. But if you want to create a full-blown cui than curses takes care of a lot of stuff for you.

Answer 3

Writing '\r' will move the cursor back to the beginning of the line.

This displays a percentage counter:

>>> for i in range(100):
...    time.sleep(1)
...    sys.stdout.write("\r%d%%" %i)    # or print >> sys.stdout, "\r%d%%" %i,
...    sys.stdout.flush()
... 

Answer 4

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/168639-progress-bar-class/ (2002) http://code.activestate.com/recipes/299207-console-text-progress-indicator-class/ (2004) http://pypi.python.org/pypi/progressbar (2006)

And a lot of tutorials waiting to be googled.

Answer 5

Run this at the Python command line (not in any IDE or development environment):

>>> import threading
>>> for i in range(50+1):
...   threading._sleep(0.5)
...   print "\r%3d" % i, ('='*i)+('-'*(50-i)),

Works fine on my Windows system.

Answer 6

import sys
def progresssbar():
         for i in range(100):
            time.sleep(1)
            sys.stdout.write("%i\r" % i)

progressbar()

If the code is not in the function then stdout prints the data and the length of the data.Don't know why stdout doesn't in a function.

Answer 7

I am using this one from reddit I like it because it can print progress for every item in one line, and it shouldn't erase printouts from program.