styled-str

styled-str is a package for creating strings styled with ANSI escape sequences. The motivation for writing this package was that many existing string-styling modules do not implement logical string behavior, like properly formatting the string, indexing, containment, all of which are useless if they don't ignore the styling.

The Styled object ignores styling and acts on just its content for the following operations:

For an example Styled s = Styled('Hello!', fg='red', style='italic')

• length, e.g. len(s) => 6
• formatting, e.g. f'{s:.3}' => 'Hel'
• indexing, e.g. s[1] => 'e'
• iteration, e.g. for c in s: => H, e, l, l, o, !
• reversed, e.g. for c in reversed(s): => !, o, l, l, e, H
• containment, e.g. only characters of "Hello!" are True for c in s

We would like to have a strings with the same content viewed as distinct though, and so Styled includes styling for the following operations:

For example Styled a = Styled('Hello!', fg='red'); b = Styled('Hello!', bg='blue')

• equality, e.g. a == b => False
• comparison, e.g. a < b => True

Installation

Install using pip (Python3):

pip3 install styled-str

Usage

Import the module and create a string with your desired styles:

from styledstr import Styled

s = Styled('Hello World!', fg='cyan', bg='white', style=['bold', 'underlined'])

# Print it out
print(s)

# Use it in a larger string
print("He said, '" + str(s) + "'")

# Format it worry-free!
print(f'Title: {s:>20}')

Behavior

In the following examples, variables prefixed with styled refer to Styled strings, while variables prefixed with regular refer to standard Python strings.

The following builtin functions all work as they normally would on only the underlying string contents:

• repr(styled)

• int(styled)

• float(styled)

• complex(styled)

• hash(styled)

• str(styled) returns a Python string that includes escape sequences for the specified formatting.