ansicolortags 0.4

ansicolortags brings a simple and powerful way to use colours in a terminal application with Python 2 and 3.

The ansicolortags module provides efficient and useful functions to use colours in a terminal application with Python 2 and 3, with a HTML-tag like style : <red>text<white> will print text in red.

All ANSI colors code are defined with this tag-like style. This point is the main interest of this module, because all others modules define function to print with some colours.

The complete documentation can be found here : http://ansicolortags.readthedocs.io/ !

Colours

Foregrounds

You can choose one of the 8 basic ANSI colours: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white. The names beginning with a lower-script design foreground colours.

For example:

from ansicolortags import printc
printc('<reset>This is default. <red>This is red<yellow> and yellow in foreground now<reset>').

Backgrounds

You can choose one of the 8 basic ANSI colours: Black, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Magenta, Cyan, White. The names beginning with an upper-script design background colors.

For example:

from ansicolortags import printc
printc('<Default>this is default. <Blue>this have a blue background<Black> and black in background now<reset>').

Other tags

The following tags are also available:

• b, B : to turn on and off the bold mode,
• u, U : to turn on and off the underline mode,
• neg, Neg : to turn on and off the reverse video mode,
• blink, Blink : to turn on and off the blink mode,
• el : to erase the current line,
• bell : to make the terminal ring.

Shortcuts

Some macros are also provided, like the tags <ERROR>, <INFO> or <WARNING>.

And also <warning> and <question>, which respectively give a colored ! and ?.

The reset tag is a special tag to reinitialize all previously changed parameters.

Writing to a file ?

This is possible with the writec function. For example:

import sys
from ansicolortags import writec
writec('<ERROR><u><red>The computer is going to explode!<reset>', fn=sys.stderr)
# sys.stderr.flush()
# this is useless : writec flush itself.

Auto detection

Of course, the colors are disabled if the output does not support them.

It works perfectly on any GNU/Linux (tested with Ubuntu 10+, Debian, Arch Linux) and Windows (with or without Cygwin), and should work fine one MAC OS X or on other UNIX-like.

Other features

Other functions

There is also the xtitle() function, to change the title of the terminal. This try to use the command-line tool xtitle, and if it fails it tries to use an ANSI code to change the title.

There is also a notify() function to display a system notification (using the command-line tool notify-send).

Script

ansicolortags.py is also a script. You can have his description (or use it) directly with:

python -m ansicolortags --help

For testing

ansicolortags.py can be used to run some tests (with the --test option).

With GNU/Bash

ansicolortags.py can be used to generate a GNU/Bash color profile (with the --generate --file color.sh options).

See here for this color.sh file

This sh file can be imported with $ . color.sh in any GNU/Bash scripts, or even in your ~/.bashrc file.

License ?

This module is licensed under the term of the MIT License, see the file LICENSE for more details.