Moving the cursor

[bladactania]

I'm using C in a terminal window. I am printing out the % completed. I want the program to print the percentage in the same place each time so I don't get

0%
1%
2%
3%
4%

and so on. I want to move the cursor to the beginning of the same line and overwrite. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks

[TkTech]

Are you on windows?

[bladactania]

Linux at the moment. But I'd like to be able to do it for windows too.

[TkTech]

Just print a backspace.

Or, on windows, SetConsoleCursor in shell32.dll

[bladactania]

how do I print a backspace? I thought printf("\b"); but that didn't work.

[Aereshaa]

Well, I'd use DEL characters, not backspaces::

printf("%d%%",percent);
printf("\x7f\x7f");

The ascii DEL character is hexadecimal 7F, and deletes the character before it. Hope that helps.

[Zed]

Hi, can you please paste here the code which printing out this text.
0%
1%
2%
3%
4%


Thanks.

[Xav]

You could display it in a progress bar. I know that isn't really feasible in a Linux command line application, but you could try doing it like this:

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Just a challenge.

[Aereshaa]

hmm.. I've done a bit of research, and you could do it with ansi escape sequences:

for(int prcnt = 0;prcnt != 100;prcnt++){
printf("%d%%",prcnt);?//prints 1% 2% etc 
fputs("\033[A");//this escape code moves the cursor up by one.
}

this will work on all operating systems, even windows.

[Xav]

Oh, OK. Glad you found the solution. For a challenge, though, try the progress bar. You could do it with continuous pipe symbols (|) to build up a visual representation of the percentage.