From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-06-12T00:10:11+09:00
Subject: Re: raa-install: package list update?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Campbell" <michael_s_campbell@yahoo.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 9:59 AM
Subject: Re: raa-install: package list update?


> > When I do this, I use a simple \r (carriage return).
> > I've never known it to fail or be messy, even on
> > (ack) MSDOS.
> 
> Your code works in the most hostile environment I have available;
> emacs shell buffer, running both bash and cmd.exe (both under
> Windows).
> 
> However, it will *only* work if you have the "repeating" part of the
> text string at the beginning of the line, where some apps have it in
> the middle, like:
> 
> Entries Processed: ______
> 
> In that case, I've seen a number of "solutions" using (usually)
> backspace, which causes:
> 
> Entries Processed:  1^H2^H3^H4...
> 
> and so on.  

What I do in that case is simply rewrite the
entire line. And right-justify any numbers.

In fact, take my example and switch the order,
and I think it will still work fine.

Then I think it's only a problem if you have
varying-width text strings. My answer to that
would be to right-pad with spaces. Inefficient
and clumsy, but should work.

It's a matter of taste whether you like this 
kind of thing, but I think \r is fairly safe.

Hal