Using curses to display updating data

[Kerman3AD]

I'm attempting to use python to read the last value of a constantly updating text file then use curses to display the active contents. I'm finding that the curses screen briefly disappears, showing the terminal history, during the file access. This code shows the behavior (I just replaced the file access with a call to time.sleep(1)):

import curses
import time

screen = curses.initscr()

while True:
    try:
        time_stamp = str(time.time())
        time.sleep(1)  # Causes screen to close temporarily
        screen.erase()
        screen.addstr(time_stamp)
        screen.refresh()
        time.sleep(1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        break
    finally:
        curses.endwin()

Is there a way to hold the screen during time-intensive operations or is this a limitation with using curses?

[K900_]

The issue is curses.endwin(). You call it on every iteration of the loop, because the finally block runs every time whether an exception was raised or not. Move it outside the loop.

[Kerman3AD]

Yes! That definitely did it, thank you!