colorama 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.
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 >
Product's homepage
Requirements:
· Python
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Added some documentation for cursor positioning and clear screen to README. Add 'reinit' and 'deinit' functions, as suggested by Charles FOL and Romanov DA.
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