printf console formatting

I want to make a console display with print开发者_运维技巧f, where periodically I get some inputs on 3 channels, and I wanted to print lines like :

Channel1 Last_message_1
Channel2 Last_message_2
Channel3 Last_message_3

and when a new message comes on channel2 I want to overwrite that part of the console. Like:

Channel1 Last_message_1
Channel2 New_message_2
Channel3 Last_message_3

I know this sort of stuff can be done with printf, but I don't remember how. Any pointers ?

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This post might be useful:

print to screen from c console application overwriting current line

in particular, answer #2 (not the selected answer)

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As far as I know you can only change the last line with printf, and here you want to change any line, so I think you will need to look into ncurses.

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You can't do this portably with printf. If your console supports it, you can send it ANSI control codes to position the cursor -- but the ANSI control codes are fairly clumsy, and quite a few "consoles" just don't support them, in which case you'll get a lot of extra garbage with the data you're trying to produce.

That leaves using something that's at least theoretically non-portable. If portability still matters, my immediate choice among those would probably be ncurses -- it's reasonably decently design, fairly easy to use, and reasonably portable.

If I was sure portability didn't matter at all and I was writing (for example) purely for Windows, it'd be worth considering using the native console functions. It's open to argument that this is rarely a very good tradeoff though -- you lose all portability, and gain only a little speed, etc.

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printf ( "\033[2;1H");     // move to 2nd line