colorama 0.1.8

Cross-platform colored terminal text.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/colorama (docs and download) http://code.google.com/p/colorama/ (development)

Description

Makes ANSI escape character sequences for producing colored terminal text work under MS Windows.

ANSI escape character sequences have long been used to produce colored terminal text on Unix and Macs. Colorama makes this work on Windows, too. It also provides some shortcuts to help generate ANSI sequences, and works fine in conjunction with any other ANSI sequence generation library, such as Termcolor (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/termcolor.)

This has the upshot of providing a simple cross-platform API for printing colored terminal text from Python, and has the happy side-effect that existing applications or libraries which use ANSI sequences to produce colored output on Linux or Macs can now also work on Windows, simply by calling colorama.init().

Dependencies

None, other than Python. Tested on Python 2.5.5, 2.6.5 & 3.1.2.

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 request other optional functionality, see keyword args below.) The intention is that applications can call init() unconditionally on all platforms, after which ANSI output should just work.

Colored Output

Cross-platform printing of colored text can then be done using Colorama’s constant shorthand for ANSI escape sequences:

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:

from colorama import init
from termcolor import colored

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

# then use Termcolor for all colored text output
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.

Init Keyword Args

init() accepts some kwargs to override default behaviour.

init(autoreset=False):

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'

init(strip=None):

Pass True or False to override whether ansi codes should be stripped from the output. The default behaviour is to strip if on Windows.

init(convert=None):

Pass True or False to override whether to convert ansi codes in the output into win32 calls. The default behaviour is to convert if on Windows and output is to a tty (terminal).

init(wrap=True):

On Windows, colorama works by replacing sys.stdout and sys.stderr with proxy objects, which override the .write() method to do their work. If this wrapping causes you problems, then this can be disabled by passing init(wrap=False). The default behaviour is to wrap if autoreset or strip or convert are True.

When wrapping is disabled, colored printing on non-Windows platforms will continue to work as normal. To do cross-platform colored output, you can use Colorama’s AnsiToWin32 proxy directly:

from colorama import init, AnsiToWin32 init(wrap=False) stream = AnsiToWin32(sys.stderr).stream print >>stream, Fore.BLUE + ‘blue text on stderr’

Status & Known Problems

Feature complete as far as colored text goes, but still finding bugs and occasionally making small changes to the API. I’d like to also handle ANSI codes which position the text cursor and clear the terminal.

Only tested on WinXP (CMD, Console2) and Ubuntu (gnome-terminal, xterm). Much obliged if anyone can let me know how it fares elsewhere, in particular on Macs.

See outstanding issues and wishlist at: http://code.google.com/p/colorama/issues/list

Development

Tests require Michael Foord’s modules ‘unittest2’ and ‘mock’, running tests using:

unit2 discover -p '*_test.py'

If using ‘nosetests’ for test discovery, be aware that it applies a proxy of its own to stdout, which confuses the unit tests. Use ‘nosetests -s’ to fix this.

Changes

0.1.9

Fix incompatibility with Python 2.5 and earlier Remove setup.py dependency on setuptools, now uses stdlib distutils

0.1.8

Fix ghastly errors all over the place on Ubuntu. Add init kwargs ‘convert’ and ‘strip’, which supercede the old ‘wrap’.

0.1.7

Python 3 compatible. Fix: Now strips ansi on windows without necessarily converting it to win32 calls (eg. if output is not a tty.) Fix: Flaky interaction of interleaved ansi sent to stdout and stderr. Improved demo.sh (hg checkout only.)

0.1.6

Fix ansi sequences with no params now default to parmlist of [0] Fix flaky behaviour of autoreset and reset_all atexit. Fix stacking of repeated atexit calls - now just called once. Fix ghastly import problems while running tests. demo.py (hg checkout only) now demonstrates autoreset and reset atexit. provide colorama.__version__, used by setup.py Tests defanged so they no longer actually change terminal color when run.

0.1.5

Now works on Ubuntu.

0.1.4

Implemented RESET_ALL on application exit

0.1.3

Implemented init(wrap=False)

0.1.2

Implemented init(autoreset=True)

0.1.1

Minor tidy

0.1

Works on Windows for foreground color, background color, bright or dim