Python Progress Bar

Question

How do I use a progress bar when my script is doing some task that is likely to take time?

For example, a function which takes some time to complete and returns True when done. How can I display a progress bar during the time the function is being executed?

Note that I need this to be in real time, so I can't figure out what to do about it. Do I need a thread for this? I have no idea.

Right now I am not printing anything while the function is being executed, however a progress bar would be nice. Also I am more interested in how this can be done from a code point of view.

Answer 1

With tqdm (conda install tqdm or pip install tqdm) you can add a progress meter to your loops in a second:

from time import sleep
from tqdm import tqdm
for i in tqdm(range(10)):
    sleep(3)

 60%|██████    | 6/10 [00:18<00:12,  0.33 it/s]

Also, there is a notebook version:

from tqdm.notebook import tqdm
for i in tqdm(range(100)):
    sleep(3)

You can use tqdm.auto instead of tqdm.notebook to work in both a terminal and notebooks.

tqdm.contrib contains some helper functions to do things like enumerate, map, and zip. There are concurrent maps in tqdm.contrib.concurrent.

You can even get progress sent to your phone after disconnecting from a jupyter notebook using tqdm.contrib.telegram or tqdm.contrib.discord.