[Tutor] different behaviour in Idle shell vs Mac terminal

[Alan Gauld]

On 08/01/12 23:34, Adam Gold wrote:
>
> I have short piece of code I'm using to print a string to
 > the terminal one letter at a time.  It works fine when
> I invoke the script from within Idle; each letter appears
> afterthe preceding one according to the designated time
 > interval.
 > However if I run it in the Mac terminal
 > ('python3 ./script.py'),
 > there's a pause and then the whole string prints in one go.

Thats because you are writing to stdout rather than using print
The output is buffered and the terminal prints the output after the 
bufrfer is flushed, which happens at the end of the program
(probably when the file object is auto closed). if you use print
that shouldn't happen.

The alternative is to explicitly flush() the file after each write.

> import sys
> import time
>
> text = "this text is printing one letter at a time..."
> for char in text:
>      sys.stdout.write(char)

either use
        print char,    # comma suppresses \n

or

       sys.stdout.write(char)
       sys.stdout.flush()

HTH

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/