A simple way of providing an informative and clean progress bar on the terminal that knows a terminal's current width, has a header, works out of the box when reading files, and always shows a relative percentage; progress_bar works for Python 2.6+ and 3.0+

file.txt: [========================79.3%===============>          ]

pip install progress_bar

Generally, to create any kind of progress bar with a default "size" of 100 arbitrary units:

from progress_bar import InitBar

pbar = InitBar()
pbar(10)  # update % to 10%
pbar(20)  # update % to 20%
pbar(15)  # simulate Microsoft progress effects

del pbar  # move bar to final 100% and write the newline

To easily create a progress bar for reporting (reading) progress in a filehandle that can tell() its offset:

from progress_bar import InitBarForInfile

pbar = InitBarForInfile("path/to/file.txt")
instream = open("path/to/file.txt")

for line in iter(instream.readline, ''):
  pbar(instream.tell())

del pbar

With those default arguments, the bar will be as wide as the terminal window. However, it will leave to characters space on both sides to achieve a visually more appealing display. Terminal window width is defined by termios using fcntl, both from the standard library. The progress bar will be prefixed with the basename of the input file ("file.txt" in the above example).

• 6: removed remaining function annotations (Py2.7; thanks to Adam Knight)
• 5: fixed a few rough edges from the last update
• 4: made the bars with titles one-liners and fixed functions names (FunctionNames, ClassNames, methodNames, variable_names) because the PEP8 convention of using "snake_case" for nearly all names makes no sense to me what-so-ever... Finally, fixed the documentation to reflect Sphinx standards.
• 3: fixed the version number so PEP426 issues are avoided (pip install now works...)
• 2: updated the readme/usage section to reflect tell() issues with Python3
• 1: initial release

License: Apache License v2. Copyright 2007-2013 Florian Leitner. All rights reserved.