Display a countdown for the python sleep function

Question

I am using time.sleep(10) in my program. Can display the countdown in the shell when I run my program?

>>>run_my_program()
tasks done, now sleeping for 10 seconds

and then I want it to do 10,9,8,7....

is this possible?

Answer 1

you could always do

#do some stuff print 'tasks done, now sleeping for 10 seconds' for i in xrange(10,0,-1):     time.sleep(1)     print i 

This snippet has the slightly annoying feature that each number gets printed out on a newline. To avoid this, you can

import sys import time for i in xrange(10,0,-1):     sys.stdout.write(str(i)+' ')     sys.stdout.flush()     time.sleep(1) 

Answer 2

This is the best way to display a timer in the console for Python 3.x:

import time
import sys

for remaining in range(10, 0, -1):
    sys.stdout.write("\r")
    sys.stdout.write("{:2d} seconds remaining.".format(remaining))
    sys.stdout.flush()
    time.sleep(1)

sys.stdout.write("\rComplete!            \n")

This writes over the previous line on each cycle.