How to output text in the R console without creating new lines?

r newline rstudio output-formatting
DuckMaestro picture DuckMaestro · Jan 18, 2013 · Viewed 81.4k times · Source

I would like to output a progress indicator during my lengthy running algorithms. I can easily "bubble up" a progress value from within my algorithm (e.g. via invoking a provided function callback specifically for this purpose), but the difficulty is in the actual text output process. Every call to print creates a new line, and each prefixed with [1].

Is there a way to print at different moments in time, without introducing line breaks?

To be concrete, I want to achieve an "animation" that would look like the following if observed at two different times.

0%...

...

0%...2%...4%...

Answer

Andrie picture Andrie · Jan 18, 2013

Use cat() instead of print():

cat("0%")
cat("..10%")

Outputs:

0%..10%

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