colorama 0.2.6

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, by wrapping stdout, stripping ANSI sequences it finds (which otherwise show up as gobbledygook in your output), and converting them into the appropriate win32 calls to modify the state of the terminal. On other platforms, Colorama does nothing.

Colorama also provides some shortcuts to help generate ANSI sequences but 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().

An alternative approach is to install ‘ansi.sys’ on Windows machines, which provides the same behaviour for all applications running in terminals. Colorama is intended for situations where that isn’t easy (e.g. maybe your app doesn’t have an installer.)

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’.

License

Copyright Jonathan Hartley 2013. BSD 3-Clause license, see LICENSE file.

Dependencies

None, other than Python. Tested on Python 2.5.5, 2.6.5, 2.7, 3.1.2, and 3.2

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), Ubuntu (gnome-terminal, xterm), and OSX.

Some presumably valid ANSI sequences aren’t recognised (see details below) but to my knowledge nobody has yet complained about this. Puzzling.

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, would be delighted by patches, and would be happy to grant commit access to anyone who submits a working patch or two.

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 [ y;x H     # position cursor at x across, y down

# 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. It would be cool to add them though. Let me know if it would be useful for you, via the issues on google code.

Development

Running tests requires:

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

• Tests are written using the 2010 era updates to ‘unittest’, and require to be run either using Python2.7 or greater, or else to have Michael Foord’s ‘unittest2’ module 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