How to Create a Cursor or Loading Indicator for an Infinite Loop

Question

I am scraping current follow requests from Instagram. I have a main infinite loop that it making the requests and prints OK when it is done. I want to display an animated cursor or loading progress while it is downloading names.

    while  1:
        response = requests.get(IG_CFR_PAGE, headers=headers(""), params=params, cookies=cookies)
        if response.status_code == 200:
            cfr = response.json()
            for entry in cfr["data"]["data"]:
                #print(entry["text"])
                usernames.append(entry["text"])
            if cfr["data"]["cursor"]!= None:
                params['cursor'] = cfr["data"]["cursor"]
                time.sleep(1)
            else:
                break
        else:
           print(response.status_code)
           print("Error in request .... aborting")
           break
print("ok")

I looked for tqdm but it takes an iterable. In my case, I am just looping over JSON keys in line for entry in cfr["data"]["data"]: and so I guess can't use it. I just need suggestions as to know what should I use to indicate that this script is actually doing something. I just need suggestions or pseudocode is fine to send me in a right direction... the actual programming code is not needed as I will do that myself.

Thank you

Answer 1

As far as I'm aware, most functions that allow you to change the mouse cursor in Python are available only from various GUI modules - most of the popular ones, such as tkinter, PyQt5, pygame or others.

The problem is that most of these may only work when you've created a window of the GUI, which is probably unnecessary or not a nice idea if you're not using the same GUI, or any GUI for that matter. Even then, some may only take effect when the mouse pointer hovers over a certain widget in that GUI.

Note:

• I've only (unsuccessfully) tried doing this with pygame.cursors before. It may be convenient because it even lets you create a custom shape with strings, or use a system cursor. But it displays a pygame.error: video system not initialized if you try doing this without having called pygame.display.init() first. I tried creating a window and setting a cursor, but it didn't seem to take effect.
• After a quick google search for other ways to set an animated cursor, I came across this SO answer which might offer some insight if you're on windows.

---

Overall, using a terminal animation may probably be better and easier, so this is an attempt at a basic answer for a loading animation in a terminal window :

(Of course, for an indefinite length of loop, it doesn't make sense to store a percentage completion etc, so this just animates at an arbitrary pace and repeats when it reaches the end)

i, w, d = 0, 20, 10000
while True:
    # Do whatever
    # No print statements except this last one
    i = (i+1)%(w*d)
    l = i//d
    print("\r Processing... |" + " "*l+ "█" + " "*(w-l-1) +"|", end='')

i is used for iteration, w is the length of the bar, and d used to create some sort of 'delay', so that the bar doesn't change at every single iteration, but some slower (visible) speed

Edit: Important Note: The '\r' that resets the cursor position doesn't work in every terminal - it may still move to a new line for the next print() instead of the start of the same line - but this should most likely be fine in your system Terminal/cmd etc... May not be a good idea to run this in IDLE :P

Edit 2: Based on your comment, for a blinking indicator (using the same approach) -

i, d = 0, 300000
while True:
    i = (i+1)%d
    print("\r Working... " + ("█" if i < d/2 else " "), end='')