colorama 0.1.15

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().

A demo script in the source code repository prints some colored text using ANSI sequences. Compare its output under Gnome-terminal’s built in ANSI handling, versus on Windows Command-Prompt using Colorama:

These screengrabs make it clear that Colorama on Windows does not support ANSI ‘dim text’: it looks the same as ‘normal text’.

Dependencies

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

Usage

from colorama import init
init()

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'

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

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')

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

Status & Known Problems

Feature complete as far as colored text goes, but still finding bugs and occasionally making small changes to the API (such as new keyword arguments to init()).

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.

I’d like to add the ability to handle ANSI codes which position the text cursor and clear the terminal.

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

If anything doesn’t work for you, or doesn’t do what you expected or hoped for, I’d love to hear about it on that issues list.

Recognised ANSI Sequences

ANSI sequences generally take the form:

ESC [ <param> ; <param> … <command>

Where <param> is an integer, and <command> is a single letter. Zero or more params are passed to a <command>. If no params are passed, it is generally synonymous with passing a single zero. No spaces exist in the sequence, they have just been inserted here to make it easy to read.

The only ANSI sequences that colorama converts into win32 calls are:

ESC [ 0 m       # reset all (colors and brightness)
ESC [ 1 m       # bright
ESC [ 2 m       # dim (looks same as normal brightness)
ESC [ 22 m      # normal brightness

# FOREGROUND:
ESC [ 30 m      # black
ESC [ 31 m      # red
ESC [ 32 m      # green
ESC [ 33 m      # yellow
ESC [ 34 m      # blue
ESC [ 35 m      # magenta
ESC [ 36 m      # cyan
ESC [ 37 m      # white
ESC [ 39 m      # reset

# BACKGROUND
ESC [ 40 m      # black
ESC [ 41 m      # red
ESC [ 42 m      # green
ESC [ 43 m      # yellow
ESC [ 44 m      # blue
ESC [ 45 m      # magenta
ESC [ 46 m      # cyan
ESC [ 47 m      # white
ESC [ 49 m      # reset

Multiple numeric params to the ‘m’ command can be combined into a single sequence, eg:

ESC [ 36 ; 45 ; 1 m     # bright cyan text on magenta background

All other ANSI sequences of the form ESC [ <param> ; <param> ... <command> are silently stripped from the output on Windows.

Any other form of ANSI sequence, such as single-character codes or alternative initial characters, are not recognised nor stripped.

Development

Tests require Michael Foord’s modules ‘unittest2’ and ‘mock’, and unittest2 discovery doesn’t work for colorama, so use ‘nose’:

nosetests -s

The -s is required because ‘nosetests’ otherwise applies a proxy of its own to stdout, which confuses the unit tests.

Thanks

Roger Binns, for many suggestions, valuable feedback, & bug reports. Tim Golden for thought and much appreciated feedback on the initial idea.

Changes

0.1.15

Fix python3 incompatibility kindly reported by Günter Kolousek

0.1.14

Fix hard-coded reset to white-on-black colors. Fore.RESET, Back.RESET and Style.RESET_ALL now revert to the colors as they were when init() was called. Some lessons hopefully learned about testing prior to release.

0.1.13

Completely broken: barfed when installed using pip.

0.1.12

Completely broken: contained no source code. double oops.

0.1.11

Completely broken: fatal import errors on Ubuntu. oops.

0.1.10

Stop emulating ‘bright’ text with bright backgrounds. Display ‘normal’ text using win32 normal foreground instead of bright. Drop support for ‘dim’ text.

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