Proposal: setting of info, without needing `pbar` object

[Sidney Radcliffe]

• I have marked all applicable categories:
  • documentation request (i.e. "X is missing from the documentation." If instead I want to ask "how to use X?" I understand [StackOverflow#tqdm] is more appropriate)
  • new feature request
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  read the [known issues]
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  environment, where applicable:

  import tqdm, sys
  print(tqdm.__version__, sys.version, sys.platform)

progress bar info can be set in two ways:

1. With a context manager. This introduces extra indententation, and an extra line.

with tqdm(["a", "b", "c", "d"]) as pbar:
    for item in pbar:
        pbar.set_description(...)
        pbar.set_postfix(...)

2. With a pbar variable. This introduces two extra lines.

pbar = tqdm(["a", "b", "c", "d"])
for item in pbar:
    pbar.set_description(...)
    pbar.set_postfix(...)
pbar.close()

The proposal here is for a third alternative, which would be:

for item in tqdm(["a", "b", "c", "d"]):
    tqdm.set_description(...)
    tqdm.set_postfix(...)

Where tqdm.set_description and tqdm.set_postfix set a value, and then the next pbar to update takes these values.

It is slightly magical, but reminds me a bit of of the matplotlib.pyplot stateful API versus the object oriented one; where the stateful api is often more convenient for quick simple things.

I think it would help to simplify and reduce clutter in loops.

Edit:

Ah, there's a third way:

for item in (pbar := tqdm(["a", "b", "c", "d"])):
    pbar.set_description(...)
    pbar.set_postfix(...)

Maybe this is preferable to the above proposal; although it is perhaps somewhat more complex looking, it's not so bad.