Command line progress bar in Java

I have implemented this sort of thing before. Its not so much about java, but what characters to send to the console.

The key is the difference between \n and \r. \n goes to the start of a new line. But \r is just carriage return - it goes back to the start of the same line.

So the thing to do is to print your progress bar, for example, by printing the string

"|========        |\r"

On the next tick of the progress bar, overwrite the same line with a longer bar. (because we are using \r, we stay on the same line) For example:

"|=========       |\r"

What you have to remember to do, is when done, if you then just print

"done!\n"

You may still have some garbage from the progress bar on the line. So after you are done with the progress bar, be sure to print enough whitespace to remove it from the line. Such as:

"done             |\n"

Hope that helps.

There is https://github.com/ctongfei/progressbar, License: MIT

Simple console progress bar. Progress bar writing now runs on another thread.

Menlo, Fira Mono, Source Code Pro or SF Mono are recommended for optimal visual effects.

For Consolas or Andale Mono fonts, use ProgressBarStyle.ASCII (see below) because the box-drawing glyphs are not aligned properly in these fonts.

Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>me.tongfei</groupId>
  <artifactId>progressbar</artifactId>
  <version>0.5.5</version>
</dependency>

Usage:

ProgressBar pb = new ProgressBar("Test", 100); // name, initial max
 // Use ProgressBar("Test", 100, ProgressBarStyle.ASCII) if you want ASCII output style
pb.start(); // the progress bar starts timing
// Or you could combine these two lines like this:
//   ProgressBar pb = new ProgressBar("Test", 100).start();
some loop {
  ...
  pb.step(); // step by 1
  pb.stepBy(n); // step by n
  ...
  pb.stepTo(n); // step directly to n
  ...
  pb.maxHint(n);
  // reset the max of this progress bar as n. This may be useful when the program
  // gets new information about the current progress.
  // Can set n to be less than zero: this means that this progress bar would become
  // indefinite: the max would be unknown.
  ...
  pb.setExtraMessage("Reading..."); // Set extra message to display at the end of the bar
}
pb.stop() // stops the progress bar