Thread: how so i blink my text?

What? Blinking? Ugh!

Not in standard C++ anyway. You need platform-specific functionality. For POSIX, look for ANSI escape codes. There's a special escape sequence. For Win32 consoles, I don't think it's possible. And of course, if you use a GUI, you use a timer and show and hide the widget that shows the text.

I seem to remember old Windows 98 DOS terminals supporting blinking, but I might be imagining it. I think it would also be less likely to work on newer terminals.

You could always try the ANSI escape sequence, as CornedBee mentioned. http://ascii-table.com/ansi-escape-sequences.php

But personally, I hate blinking text. It's far more trouble than it's worth, and what's more, it's extremely annoying.

I agree, blinking text is a pain in the eyes.

If you still insist of using blinking text, this is relatively portable [but limited to one line of text].

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <windows.h>  // Or other include file for "sleep" function. 

int main()
{
   const char *msg = "Hello, World";
   int i;
   for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
   {
      printf("%s\r", msg);
      Sleep(100);
      // replace with Suitable "sleep" function if needed... 
      printf("%*s\r", strlen(msg), "");
   }
   return 0;
}

This will work on Windows with a 32-bit compiler - on Linux you'd probably want usleep(100 * 1000). Other OS's have other "do nothing for x amount of time.

--
Mats

That's a good idea, actually -- but it doesn't let you, for example, receive user input at the same time. (e.g., you can't display something like "Enter your name, LAST NAME FIRST" where part of the message is blinking, and then get the user to enter their name at the same time.)

Of course, you could simulate blinking text in this way if you had a way to detect whether keyboard input was entered and a way to get user input without requiring enter to be pressed. And a way to position the cursor on the screen.

Sounds like you'd be better off going with ncurses or something at that point.

One last note -- sometimes it can look weird to have the cursor at the beginning of a line of text, so I like to print the \r only when you're erasing the text. (Oh, and you're missing a few characters at the end of the second printf() line, but I think we can extrapolate what they are. )

Ah, yes, simple typo fixed, and it was more to show the principle rather than an attempt to make the best possible code for this purpose.

--
Mats