Scan printout with automatic line overwrite

scan_printout.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# Console print-out with automatic overwrite of negative results for scan tools and such.
# If you have multiple threads producing data, then you would probably need to create a dedicated worker thread for printing, 
# with maybe a thread-safe queue supplying elements to print.
# Alternatively set prev_len to a constant value and truncate lines that are to long
# U+0A75

# add padding according to length of last line
def print_fluid(text, last_len, ending):
    print(text + (" " * last_len), end=ending)
    return len(text)

data = []
prev_len = 0

# this loop would normally be some on-going scan or file parsing
for element in data:
    condition = element.startswith("a") # some condition or function that determines whether the element matches

    if condition:
        prev_len = print_fluid("[+] " + element, prev_len, "\n") # positive result
    else:
        prev_len = print_fluid("[-] " + element, prev_len, "\r") # negative result

print("[*] Done!")