Clear PHP Cli Output

Clear PHP CLI output

Try outputting a line of text and terminating it with "\r" instead of "\n".

The "\n" character is a line-feed which goes to the next line, but "\r" is just a return that sends the cursor back to position 0 on the same line.

So you can:

echo "1Done\r";
echo "2Done\r";
echo "3Done\r";

etc.

Make sure to output some spaces before the "\r" to clear the previous contents of the line.

[Edit] Optional: Interested in some history & background? Wikipedia has good articles on "\n" (line feed) and "\r" (carriage return)

How can clear screen in php cli (like cls command)

For Windows users :

system('cls');

For Linux users :

system('clear');

Clear CMD-shell with php

How about this?

<?php
$i = 1;
echo str_repeat("\n", 300); // Clears buffer history, only executes once
while(1)
{
    echo "test_".$i."\r"; // Now uses carriage return instead of new line

    sleep(1);
    $i++;
}

the str_repeat() function executes outside of the while loop, and instead of ending each echo with a new line, it moves the pointer back to the existing line, and writes over the top of it.

Update Command-line Output, i.e. for Progress

This can be done using ANSI Escape Sequences -- see here for a list.

In PHP, you'll use "\033" when it's indicated ESC on that page.

In your case, you could use something like this :

echo "Progress :      ";  // 5 characters of padding at the end
for ($i=0 ; $i<=100 ; $i++) {
    echo "\033[5D";      // Move 5 characters backward
    echo str_pad($i, 3, ' ', STR_PAD_LEFT) . " %";    // Output is always 5 characters long
    sleep(1);           // wait for a while, so we see the animation
}

I simplified a bit, making sure I always have 5 extra characters, and always displaying the same amount of data, to always move backwards by the same number of chars...

But, of course, you should be able to do much more complicated, if needed ;-)

And there are many other interesting escape sequences : colors, for instance, can enhance your output quite a bit ;-)

Php Command Line Output on the fly

First, the Windows-style end-of-line marker is \r\n, not \n\r. Not many systems ever used \n\r, but they are rare enough that you can forget about them now.

Second, chances are good the output is being block buffered -- you can either use ob_implicit_flush(1) to automatically insert a flush() command after every output command. Or, you could call flush() manually, when you need to flush output.

How do I remove text from the console in PHP?

echo chr(8);

will print a backspace character.

php command line change text output

use \r instead of \n. \r is a carriage return, it will jump back to the beginning of the line without a newline.

$percent = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i <= 100; $i++) {
    echo $percent . "\r";
    sleep(1);
    $percent++;
}

This is working on Windows, Linux and MacOS

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