The behavior you desire is not supported. A browser does not behave like a terminal. You can't just "print" to it and have things show up in sequential order.

If you're trying to get "status" messages out to the browser before the HTML (and after you've printed the Content-type: header), one option is to print the status messages as HTML comments, then examine the resulting source to see the status messages. The resulting source would look like 

<!-- status: input buffers are out of cheese -->
<!-- status: rendering algorithm is full of fleas -->
<html>
...
</html>

[download]

Now if your purpose it to show a temporary message on the browser while you perform some longer operation that'll result later in a page of HTML, merlyn just happens to have an article that shows one way to do it.

Update: I should have said "not universally supported." It's true that some browsers can be coaxed into printing text that appears outside of <html>..</html> tags, but any solution that depends on this is neither horizontally portable (across browsers) or temporally portable (across new browser releases).

In reply to Re: unbuffering I/O with objects by dws
in thread unbuffering I/O with objects by geektron

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