Problem with printing and sleeping in for loop with end key word argument

January 2, 2023

When I write the following code into python file/console:

import time, os

string = "what am I saying right now?"
for x in string:
    print(x)
    time.sleep(.1)

Output:

w
h
a
t
 
a
m
 
I
 
s
a
y
i
n
g
 
r
i
g
h
t
 
n
o
w
?

everything works as expected

However, when I add pass in anything to the end keyword argument it still works, but it does time.sleep(.1) methods before printing it out.

import time, os

string = "what am I saying right now?"
for x in string:
    print(x, end="")
    time.sleep(.1)

around 2.7 seconds later:

Output:

what am I saying right now?

There are a few issues with this:

The print statement is displayed after the whole loop is run (meaning the longer the string the longer it takes for the string to get printed out
There is no "cool" scrolling effect that is gotten from adding the sleep method after the print statement making it useless

if anyone knows why this happens and how I could mitigate this in the future that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!!!

>Solution :

Try adding flush=True argument to print. Using empty char for end means there are no newlines in the output so line-buffered output will not write to terminal unless forced to by the flush