Create a typewriter-effect animation for strings in Python

Question

Just like in the movies and in games, the location of a place comes up on screen as if it's being typed live. I want to make a game about escaping a maze in python. At the start of the game it gives the background information of the game:

line_1 = "You have woken up in a mysterious maze"
line_2 = "The building has 5 levels"
line_3 = "Scans show that the floors increase in size as you go down"

Under the variables, I tried to do a for loop for each line similar to this:

from time import sleep

for x in line_1:
    print (x)
    sleep(0.1)

The only problem with this is that it print one letter per line. The timing of it is ok, but how can I get it to go on one line?

Answer 1

Because you tagged your question with python 3 I will provide a python 3 solution:

1. Change your end character of print to an empty string: print(..., end='')
2. Add sys.stdout.flush() to make it print instantly (because the output is buffered)

Final code:

from time import sleep
import sys

for x in line_1:
    print(x, end='')
    sys.stdout.flush()
    sleep(0.1)

---

Making it random is also very simple.

1. Add this import:

   from random import uniform
   

2. Change your sleep call to the following:

   sleep(uniform(0, 0.3))  # random sleep from 0 to 0.3 seconds
   

Answer 2

lines = ["You have woken up in a mysterious maze",
         "The building has 5 levels",
         "Scans show that the floors increase in size as you go down"]

from time import sleep
import sys

for line in lines:          # for each line of text (or each message)
    for c in line:          # for each character in each line
        print(c, end='')    # print a single character, and keep the cursor there.
        sys.stdout.flush()  # flush the buffer
        sleep(0.1)          # wait a little to make the effect look good.
    print('')               # line break (optional, could also be part of the message)

Answer 3

To iterate over the lines, change the loop to:

for x in (line_1, line_2, line_3):

Answer 4

You can change the end of line character automatically added by print with print("", end=""). To printfoobar, you could do this:

print("foo", end="")
print("bar", end="")

From the documentation:

All non-keyword arguments are converted to strings like str() does and written to the stream, separated by sep and followed by end. Both sep and end must be strings; they can also be None, which means to use the default values.

Answer 5

Python Typewriter Effect

For every letter in the string, my answer provides 0.1 of a second to wait, so the text would appear one by one. Python 3 allows the use of sys.stdout.write.

import time, sys

def anything(str):


for letter in str:
  sys.stdout.write(letter)
  sys.stdout.flush()
  time.sleep(0.1)

anything("Blah Blah Blah...")

Your full code will look like this:

import time, sys

def anything(str):


  for letter in str:
    sys.stdout.write(letter)
    sys.stdout.flush()
    time.sleep(0.1)

anything("You have woken up in a 
mysterious maze")

anything("The building has five 
levels")

anything("Scans show that the floors 
increase in size as you go down")