Allow temporary printing to console

It would be nice to be able to temporarily print to console or print in place. For example, I would like to have output like

================================================
My Verbose Test Cases
================================================

Started Noisy Test Case

and then over time have it print out

Started Noisy Test Case ... Doing setup

Started Noisy Test Case ... Logging In

Started Noisy Test Case ... Entering Data

Started Noisy Test Case ... Submitted

Started Noisy Test Case ... Validating Results

Started Noisy Test Case ... Completed (and I am happy)

and then ends up like

================================================
My Verbose Test Cases
================================================

Started Noisy Test Case ... Completed (and I am happy)         | PASS |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Verbose Test Cases                                                           | PASS |
1 critical test, 1 passed, 0 failed
1 test total, 1 passed, 0 failed
==============================================================================
Output:  C:\sandbox\tooloud\output.xml
Log:     C:\sandbox\tooloud\log.html
Report:  C:\sandbox\tooloud\report.html

Each of these would be a log keyword call; something like

  Log    Entering Data    temporary=${True}

  Log    Completed (and I am happy)\n    in-place=${False}

or some other flag ?!?

[HelioGuilherme66]

I suppose Ed wants a real time messaging to console, showing only the current log entry which would be end in the final message. This is usually done sending a Carriage Return (CR) char, like ‘\r’, in the beginning of log message. The problem with this is when output is redirected to file/stream not a display.

[pekkaklarck]

You actually can accomplish this already, at least to some extend, by using Log Console with newlines (\n) and carriage returns (\r) in the test data. Try, for example, running this example with --ConsoleMarkers off option:

*** Test Cases ***
Example
  Log to console    \nFOO    no_newline=True
  Sleep    1
  Log to console    \r------    no_newline=True
  Sleep    1
  Log to console    \rBAR

As you can see if you test the above, there’s a problem that \r doesn’t erase the earlier text but just moves the cursor to the beginning of the line. Thus you end up with BAR--- and not with BAR that you might expect/want. A solution is adding enough spaces at the end of the string. That could be done manually e.g. like ${SPACE * 10}, but perhaps enhancing Log To Console to accept the amount of padding as an optional argument would be better.

Even better than making the padding optional would be accepting the same format specification that Python’s format() function accepts. It would allow configuring padding, alignment, etc. What do others think, should we add format_spec=None argument to Log To Console and perhaps also to Log? Should we even consider adding a separate keywords just for string formatting?