cout position

[Payne747]

Hi all,

Can anyone help with me positioning the output of std::cout in a console application? Basically I want a loop which outputs a sequence of characters (a single letter for example) in the same position each time, replacing the previous character.

Thanks,

Payne747

[Lindley]

That would have to be done with OS-specific methods. There's nothing about it in the standard library.

[Payne747]

Thanks, I figured standard libraries wouldn't allow such things on a stream, however I managed to cheat by simply using the carriage return \r along with std::flush to 'cheat' :P

char progBar[] = {'|', '/', '-', '\\'};
int progPos = 0;

while (something) {
    std::cout << "\r" << progBar[progPos] << std::flush;
    progPos++;
    if (progPos == 4) {
        progPos = 0;
   }
}

Ugly, but it seems to work, though it doesn't produce very consistent results depending on the loop conditions (mine happens to be waiting on InternetReadFile() so it's quite delayed at times).

[_Superman_]

If you're programming in Windows you can use SetConsoleCursorPosition to position the cursor before a cout.