How to edit console output

Question

I have the following very simple code

stdout.write("Hello World")
stdout.write("\rBye world")
stdout.write("\rActually hello back")

Which prints as expected 'Actually hello back' however if i were to add a newline

stdout.write("\n")

How can I go back a newline and then to the beginning of the line so I can actually just output "Hi" instead of

Actually hello back
Hi

I tried

stdout.write("\r")
stdout.write("\b")

However none of them seem to do the trick. The end goal is to display a big chunk of text and then update the output in real time without having to write again. How can I achieve this in python?

EDIT My question is different than the one suggested as I don't want to modify a single line. I want to be able to print 4-5 lines of text and then replace them in real time instead of just one line that is modified.

Possible duplicate of [Replace console output in python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6169217/replace-console-output-in-python) — Tony Babarino, Mar 08 '16 at 00:37

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 08 '16 at 11:22

Well, if You want to gain full control over the terminal, I would suggest to use the curses library.

The curses module provides an interface to the curses library, the de-facto standard for portable advanced terminal handling.

Using it, You can edit multiple lines in terminal like this:

import curses
import time

stdscr = curses.initscr()

stdscr.addstr("line 1\n")
stdscr.addstr("line 2\n")
stdscr.refresh()
time.sleep(3)

stdscr.erase()
stdscr.addstr("edited line 1\n")
stdscr.addstr("edited line 2\n")
stdscr.refresh()
time.sleep(3)

curses.endwin()

The capabilities of this library are much greater though. Full tutorial here.

How to edit console output

1 Answers1