Coding Natural Language, Fall 2021, Week 7

Clearing the screen

In a one-on-one help session today, I realized that some people doing the game option might be interested in clearing the terminal window at various times. Here is some code and explanation to show you how to do that.

Add this code to the top of your program, perhpas the first line, or at least up in the area where you're doing imports:

import os

Also at the top of your program, after your import statements but before you do anything else, add this chunk of code:

# define our clear function
def clear():
    # for mac and linux
    if os.name == 'posix':
        _ = os.system('clear')
    # for windows, os.name is 'nt'
    else:
        _ = os.system('cls')

Now, whenever you want to clear the screen, call this function, like this:

clear()

A note about where to do this: If you print() a bunch of text to the screen and then call clear() right after, the user will not be able to read the text that you printed. (Because it will be immediately cleared!) So you probably want to call clear() and then print any text you wish the user to see.

Here is an example of this in use, adding it into the main_v2.py program from the class homepage, which we looked at week 12 that shows how to use the game tree with markovify:

main_v2_with_clear.py - New code is added in blue

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