Delete the input line right after input has been sent

Question

I'm looking for a good way to hide input entered for a chat-like system on WIndows

For now, i wrote this

import sys

name = input("Enter your message: ")
sys.stdout.write('\r')
print(message)

But it doesn't do anything.

I'd like to do something like this

Enter your message: Hello

Output:
Hello

That is way better then

Enter your message: Hello

Output:
Enter your message: Hello
Hello

So the final output, after some messages will be

Hello
How are you?
I'm fine thanks.

And not

Enter your message: Hello
Hello
Enter your message: How are you?
How are you?
Enter your message: I'm fine thanks.
I'm fine thanks. 

I've seen some questions like mine before asking but i didn't find anything working, i also can't use os because it has to contain more inputs, i also tried using \r but (as i used it) doesn't do what i want it to do, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is now a year old, but I faced the same issue and I think what you'd be looking for is using ANSI escape codes.

Specifically, I used '\033[1A' and '\033[K', I don't have as much experience on them but as far as I can tell they're really good for specific manipulations like this.

'[1A' would be used to go on the line above and '[K' to erase everything on the line. So if you were to print out your "Enter your message: " from your input function, save your text in a variable, use the escape codes and then print your text, I believe you'd get the desired result.

Here I made an infinite texting loop where you can get what I believe is what you're looking for:

while True:
    text = input("Enter your message: ")
    print('\033[1A' + '\033[K', end='')
    print(text)

From here on you can do all kinds of manipulation/validation of your text and such, for example a specific condition for breaking the loop.

While I was looking for an answer I found this question and bashBedlam's answer is particularly useful. They mention ANSI escape codes will not work the same on all terminals though, so it might be worth looking into if this is the solution you want.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Here is how you can do so if you are using command prompt to run your code;

from os import system
name = input('Enter your name: ')
system('cls')
print(f'Your name is {name}')

system('cls') clears the console after the input has been submitted as it is run immediately after the input is provided.

If you are using mac;

system('clear')

Answer 3

If you want to just hide the user input you could use the builtin getpass module. This is designed for passwords so it will not display what the user types on the terminal.

>>> import getpass
>>> name = getpass.getpass(prompt="name: ")
name:
>>> print(name)
Chris

Answer 4

Use this code:

import os
l = []
def main():
    empty = ""
    while True:
        message = input("Enter message: ")
        os.system("cls")
        if message == empty or message.isspace() == True:
            break
        l.append(message)
    print("Output:")
    for i in l:
        print(i)
main()