Update description to iterable

Question

For debugging, it is useful for me to have the iterable displayed as the description of the progress bar. For example:

import tqdm

mylist = ["this", "is", "a", "sentence"]
fmt = "{:" + str(max(len(i) for i in mylist)) + "s}"
pbar = tqdm.tqdm(mylist)
pbar.set_description(fmt.format(""))

for i in pbar:
    pbar.set_description(fmt.format(i), refresh=True)

Now, my question, how can I derive from tqdm.tqdm such that all of this is done 'automatically'? I.e. such that I can simply write

# ... setting up the class ....

for i in mytqdm(mylist):
    # ...

(Because I don't think it is possible in the library itself)

Answer 1

I'm having the same issue today, but I didn't know about the set_description method, so thank you a bunch!

This is one step closer to what you want, I think:

import tqdm
import time
mylist = ["this", "is", "a", "sentence"]
fmt = "{:" + str(max(len(i) for i in mylist)) + "s}"
pbar = tqdm.tqdm(mylist, desc=fmt.format(""))

for i in pbar:
    pbar.set_description(fmt.format(i), refresh=True)
    time.sleep(1)

I added a sleeper so that you can actually see the progress bar change. By setting desc in the creation of pbar, you can at least skip the first set_description, making it a bit more compact. I'm not sure there's a more compact form, since you'll need to call a function to update the description, so you'll need to have a pbar object rather than using the "for tqdm" syntax.