How do I slow down output?

How do I slow down output made through cout?
When output strings are too long to fit inside the Terminal or Command Prompt window, I want to make the text scroll slow enough to read.

Thanks in advance.

You can do it Zelda style just by outputting a character at a time, and using a timer to wait in between characters. This method requires that you put everything into strings first.

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Originally Posted by whiteflags

You can do it Zelda style just by outputting a character at a time, and using a timer to wait in between characters. This method requires that you put everything into strings first.

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Good idea.
Where do I get the timer?

The easiest way is to just Sleep between each output.

I think it is also common to prompt the user to press Return to get the next "page" of output.

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Originally Posted by anon

I think it is also common to prompt the user to press Return to get the next "page" of output.

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Hmm...yeah, that might be a better solution.
However, do you have any idea how many lines can be displayed in a normal-sized Linux Terminal or Windows Command Prompt, and are the number of lines the same (I guess probably not, eh?)?

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Originally Posted by Elysia

The easiest way is to just Sleep between each output.

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Isn't Sleep (or "sleep()") a Windows-specific function? I was wanting my program that will use this to be cross-platform, and therefore I would like the method of slowing down output (if I decide to even use this approach) to be cross-platform as well.

There is a standard way to do what I was saying, posted here. But it sounds like the other thing is better, anyway. For a good console size, I don't think you can go wrong with 80 characters x 25 lines so just work around that.

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Originally Posted by whiteflags

There is a standard way to do what I was saying, posted here. But it sounds like the other thing is better, anyway. For a good console size, I don't think you can go wrong with 80 characters x 25 lines so just work around that.

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Thanks.

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Originally Posted by Programmer_P

Hmm...yeah, that might be a better solution.
However, do you have any idea how many lines can be displayed in a normal-sized Linux Terminal or Windows Command Prompt, and are the number of lines the same (I guess probably not, eh?)?

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Not standard. It is configurable. The only way to know is to use Windows API, which you want to avoid in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Programmer_P

Isn't Sleep (or "sleep()") a Windows-specific function? I was wanting my program that will use this to be cross-platform, and therefore I would like the method of slowing down output (if I decide to even use this approach) to be cross-platform as well.

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It is. But there is no portable way of doing without wasting lots of cpu resources. You could just limit yourself to Windows and Linux.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by whiteflags

There is a standard way to do what I was saying, posted here. But it sounds like the other thing is better, anyway. For a good console size, I don't think you can go wrong with 80 characters x 25 lines so just work around that.

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Why? WHY??? This is the very exact thing we suggest people avoid!
Delay loops are frowned upon, so why would you suggest it? I don't understand.

He asked for a standard way. I couldn't do anything about how much standard code sucks in that situation. Make me a martyr for it.

What I'd really like to know is - why the hell don't we have a good standard way of doing this?

Probably not useful enough. The committee have limited resources and has to prioritize. That's my guess, anyway.