colorama 0.1

Cross-platform colored terminal text.

http://code.google.com/p/colorama/

Description

Provides a simple cross-platform API to print colored terminal text from Python applications.

ANSI escape character sequences are commonly used to produce colored terminal text on Macs and Unix. Colorama provides some shortcuts to generate these sequences, and makes them work on Windows too.

This has the happy side-effect that existing applications or libraries which already use ANSI sequences to produce colored output on Linux or Macs (eg. using packages like ‘termcolor’) can now also work on Windows, simply by importing and initialising Colorama.

Status

In development. Some features, as noted below, are not implemented yet.

Dependencies

None, other than Python. Tested on Python 2.6.5.

Usage

Initialisation

Applications should initialise Colorama using:

from colorama import init
init()

If you are on Windows, the call to ‘’init()’’ will start filtering ANSI escape sequences out of any text sent to stdout or stderr, and will replace them with equivalent Win32 calls.

Calling ‘’init()’’ has no effect on other platforms (unless you use ‘autoreset’, see below) The intention is that all applications should call init() unconditionally, then their colored text output simply works on all platforms.

Colored Output

Cross-platform printing of colored text can then be done:

from colorama import Fore, Back, Style
print Fore.RED + 'some red text'
print Back.GREEN + and with a green background'
print Style.DIM + 'and in dim text'
print + Fore.DEFAULT + Back.DEFAULT + Style.DEFAULT
print 'back to normal now'

or simply by manually printing ANSI sequences from your own code:

print '/033[31m' + 'some red text'
print '/033[30m' # and reset to default color

or Colorama can be used happily in conjunction with existing ANSI libraries such as Termcolor (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/termcolor):

# use Colorama to make Termcolor work on Windows too
from colorama import init
init()

# then use Termcolor for all colored text output
from termcolor import colored
print colored('Hello, World!', 'green', 'on_red')

Available formatting constants are:

Fore: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, DEFAULT.
Back: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, DEFAULT.
Style: DIM, NORMAL, BRIGHT, RESET_ALL

Style.RESET_ALL resets foreground, background and brightness. Colorama will perform this reset automatically on program exit (Not implemented).

Autoreset

Not implemented

If you find yourself repeatedly sending reset sequences to turn off color changes at the end of every print, then init(autoreset=True) will automate that:

from colorama import init
init(autoreset=True)
print Fore.RED + 'some red text'
print 'automatically back to default color again'

Without wrapping stdout

Colorama works by wrapping stdout and stderr with proxy objects, that override write() to do their work. Using init(autoreset=True) will do this wrapping on all platforms, not just Windows.

If these proxy objects wrapping stdout and stderr cause you problems, then this can be disabled using init(wrap=False) (Not implemented), and you can instead access Colorama’s AnsiToWin32 proxy directly. Any attribute access on this object will be forwarded to the stream it wraps, apart from .write(), which on Windows is overridden to first perform the ANSI to Win32 conversion on text:

from colorama import init, AnsiToWin32
init(wrap=False)

stream = AnsiToWin32(sys.stderr)
print >>stream, Fore.BLUE + 'blue text on stderr'

Development

Tests require Michael Foord’s Mock module. I have been using nosetests to run the tests although they may work without it, using:

python -m colorama.tests.<module>

Known Problems

Only recognised ANSI escape sequences (‘m’ commands, ie. colors, dim/bright) are filtered out of the output text. Unrecognised sequences (eg. moving the text cursor) appear as gobbledygook in the output on Windows. Ideally, these could be implimented using win32 calls too. In the meantime, is it better to filter them out of the output? I don’t know.