colorama 0.2.1

Description

Makes ANSI escape character sequences, for producing colored terminal text and cursor positioning, work under MS Windows.

ANSI escape character sequences have long been used to produce colored terminal text and cursor positioning 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().

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

These screengrabs show 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, 2.7 & 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.RESET + Back.RESET + Style.RESET_ALL
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, RESET.
Back: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, RESET.
Style: DIM, NORMAL, BRIGHT, RESET_ALL

Status & Known Problems

I’ve personally only tested it on WinXP (CMD, Console2) and Ubuntu (gnome-terminal, xterm), although it sounds like others are using it on other platforms too.

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

# cursor positioning
ESC [ x;y H     # position cursor at x,y

# clear the screen
ESC [ mode J    # clear the screen. Only mode 2 (clear entire screen)
                # is supported. It should be easy to add other modes,
                # let me know if that would be useful.

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

Running tests requires:

• Michael Foord’s ‘mock’ module to be installed.

• Either to be run under Python2.7 or 3.1 stdlib unittest, or to have Michael Foord’s ‘unittest2’ module to be installed.

unittest2 test discovery doesn’t work for colorama, so I 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

Daniel Griffith for multiple fabulous patches. Oscar Lester for valuable fix to stop ANSI chars being sent to non-tty output. Roger Binns, for many suggestions, valuable feedback, & bug reports. Tim Golden for thought and much appreciated feedback on the initial idea.

Changes

0.2.1

Added some documentation for cursor positioning and clear screen to README. Add ‘reinit’ and ‘deinit’ functions, as suggested by Charles FOL and Romanov DA.

0.2

Merge in changes from Daniel Griffith: Add ANSI cursor positioning & partial support for clear screen. Patch submitted by Oscar Lester, don’t send RESET_ALL to non-tty. Demos split into separate files and moved into their own directory. Tweak sys.path in demos so they run against local source, not installed version of Colorama.

0.1.18

Fix README (no such attr as Fore.DEFAULT, etc), kindly reported by nodakai.

0.1.17

Prevent printing of garbage ANSI codes upon installing with pip

0.1.16

Re-upload to fix previous error. Make clean now removes old MANIFEST.

0.1.15

Completely broken. Distribution was empty due to leftover invalid MANIFEST file from building on a different platform. 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