How to print 'tight' dots horizontally in python?

Question

I have a program which prints out its progress to the console. Every 20 steps, it prints the number of steps like 10 20 30, etc. but within this, it prints a dot. This is printed using the print statement with a comma at the end (python 2.x)

        if epoch % 10 == 0:
            print epoch,
        else:
            print ".",

Unfortunately, I noticed that the dots are printed apart from each other, like this:

0 . . . . . . . . . 10 . . . . . . . . . 20 . . . . . . . . . 30

I want this to be tighter, as follows:

0.........10.........20.........30

In visual basic language, we can get this form if we add a semicolon to the end of the print statement instead of the comma. Is there a similar way to do so in Python, or a walkthrough to get tighter output?

Note:

With all thanks and respect to all who replied, I noticed that some of them considered the change in 'epoch' happens in a timely manner. Actually, it is not, as it happens after finishing some iterations, which may take from a fraction of second to several minutes.

Answer 1

If you want to get more control over the formatting then you need to use either:

import sys
sys.stdout.write('.')
sys.stdout.flush()  # otherwise won't show until some newline printed

.. instead of print, or use the Python 3 print function. This is available as a future import in later builds of Python 2.x as:

from __future__ import print_function
print('.', end='')

In Python 3 you can pass the keyword argument flush:

print('.', end='', flush=True)

which has the same effect as the two lines of sys.stdout above.

Answer 2

import itertools
import sys
import time


counter = itertools.count()


def special_print(value):
    sys.stdout.write(value)
    sys.stdout.flush()


while True:
    time.sleep(0.1)
    i = next(counter)
    if i % 10 == 0:
        special_print(str(i))
    else:
        special_print('.')

Answer 3

Here's a possible solution:

import time
import sys

width = 101

for i in xrange(width):
    time.sleep(0.001)
    if i % 10 == 0:
        sys.stdout.write(str(i))
        sys.stdout.flush()
    else:
        sys.stdout.write(".")
        sys.stdout.flush()

sys.stdout.write("\n")