How to clear the board

Question

The issue I'm having is how can I make my game stop "re-printing" the board game and not show the board again and again every round/turn in the console? I want it to change the "X" in the 1st board and not reprint the board with the "X".

Here's the code:

from random import randint

board = []

for x in range(5):
    board.append(["O"] * 5)

def print_board(board):
    for row in board:
        print " ".join(row)

print "Let's play Battleship!"
print_board(board)

def random_row(board):
    return randint(0, len(board) - 1)

def random_col(board):
    return randint(0, len(board[0]) - 1)

ship_row = random_row(board)
ship_col = random_col(board)

print ship_row
print ship_col

for turn in range(4):
    guess_row = int(raw_input("Guess Row:"))
    guess_col = int(raw_input("Guess Col:"))

    if guess_row == ship_row and guess_col == ship_col:
        print "Congratulations! You sunk my battleship!"
        break
    else:
        if (guess_row < 0 or guess_row > 4) or (guess_col < 0 or guess_col > 4):
            print "Oops, that's not even in the ocean."
        elif(board[guess_row][guess_col] == "X"):
            print "You guessed that one already."
        else:
            print "You missed my battleship!"
            board[guess_row][guess_col] = "X"
        print "Turn", turn + 1
        print_board(board)

print "Game Over"

Answer 1

If you want to go simple, you can clear the screen with this line:

print(chr(27) + "[2J")

And then quickly repaint the board.

For more advanced console management, you can use the curses module. It is not very easy to use, but it will let you do a lot of fancy stuff. It is actually thin binding of the C curses library, so you may find a lot more documenatation if you search for the C one.

If you want to go graphic, the standard library is pygame . It is a not-so thin binding of the popular SDL library, but you will find a lot of pygame examples out there.