The problem?

You’re writing a Python script which carries out some tasks in a loop. Maybe you’re processing data in a bunch of files, or scraping a list of websites. Whatever it is, the task takes anything from a few seconds to a few minutes to complete. Wouldn’t it be great if you could visualise progress (in the command line no less!) easily, and without some ugly print() statements in your code?

The solution!

Enter tqdm! Lets create a trivial example to show the functionality:

import time
from tqdm import *

for x in tqdm(range(10)):
    time.sleep(1)

Voila! Progess (bar)!

The great thing about tqdm is that is can take any iterable, and also has a bunch of options, which you can find out more about in the tqdm source code.

Notes:

1. If you want to learn more about pyenv and pyenv virtualenv and why they’re awesome, you can check out my previous post!
2. The code used to generate the gif above actually uses the following code when generating the loop: for x in tqdm(range(10), leave=True), as by default the progress bar will be ‘erased’ when the iterable terminates. Find out more here.