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How to overwrite characters with printf?

I want to make printf to overwrite previously writen characters in the screen (stdout), like we see in many consele programs, I want to make an animated "Calculating......", or "Progress...."

The Idea is:

//Calculating.............. -> When there are 10 dots, then I erase all dots and start writing dot after dot again till it gets to 10.

printf(".");


Or that thing "Calculating \ | / -- \ | / --

How do I do that?
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UrosVidojevic
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You can do that with <conio.h> gotoxy() function.
But it depends on which compiler do you use.
Some of them don't have that header or function.
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josgood
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>> As UrosVidojevic says we have to use gotoxy()  function to achieve this.

gotoxy is not standard. And neither is the \b technique. So, I wouldn't say that you can't use one but have to use the other. It all depends what systems you want to use this for.

Myself, I have found that most systems handle the \b correctly, and I use it from time to time with success. But never for code that is supposed to be portable.

gotoxy is a VERY system specific solution (more so than \b), so my preference would also be the \b solution, assuming that you test whether it works on your system ;)
I didn't realize that \b is non-portable.  If Infinity08 says it isn't portable then it most likely isn't -- he's usually right.

Infin, I stand corrected.  Have you a reference for which escape sequences are portable?

On my system, WinXP with VS2005, \b works fine.  sjith2000's example of printf("abc\bdef"); displays as abdef.  The c is overwritten.
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karfi

Maybe you could use '\r' (carriage return).
In this case you have to print out the whole line every time.
>> Infin, I stand corrected.  Have you a reference for which escape sequences are portable?

I might have caused some confusion.

What I meant with portability, is that the code has to work on all systems, even the most exotic. The C standard does prescribe what \b should do, but not all systems can handle the backspace character correctly, for the simple reason that their display device can't do it (eg. it can't move back, or can't erase characters already written to the screen).

A slight nuance maybe ;)

For your reference - here's what the C standard says about it :

        \b (backspace)
        Moves the active position to the previous position on the current line. If the
        active position is at the initial position of a line, the behavior of the display
        device is unspecified.

Btw, this also means that if you need to be able to move the cursor to a different line, you can't use \b.


>> On my system, WinXP with VS2005, \b works fine.  sjith2000's example of printf("abc\bdef"); displays as abdef.  The c is overwritten.

On most systems it works fine (as it should). It is however always best to test it out, instead of taking it for granted.

The question asks to do something that is sometimes not trivially possible with standard C. So, any solution presented will have downsides. It's just a question which one you use. In my experience, gotoxy is less common, and so I prefer the \b solution.

In short : your solution is good josgood - I didn't mean to make you think otherwise :) My response was more intended for sjith2000.
Thank you, Infin.
         :-)
 I appreciate the clarification.
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Thanks, good solutions guys. Sorry I have no more points to share with Infinity08 for the clarification.

And sorry for the delay.