How to print colored text in Python?

Question

How can I output colored text to the terminal in Python?

Answer 1

On Windows you can use module 'win32console' (available in some Python distributions) or module 'ctypes' (Python 2.5 and up) to access the Win32 API.

To see complete code that supports both ways, see the color console reporting code from Testoob.

ctypes example:

import ctypes

# Constants from the Windows API
STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE = -11
FOREGROUND_RED    = 0x0004 # text color contains red.

def get_csbi_attributes(handle):
    # Based on IPython's winconsole.py, written by Alexander Belchenko
    import struct
    csbi = ctypes.create_string_buffer(22)
    res = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo(handle, csbi)
    assert res

    (bufx, bufy, curx, cury, wattr,
    left, top, right, bottom, maxx, maxy) = struct.unpack("hhhhHhhhhhh", csbi.raw)
    return wattr


handle = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE)
reset = get_csbi_attributes(handle)

ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetConsoleTextAttribute(handle, FOREGROUND_RED)
print "Cherry on top"
ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetConsoleTextAttribute(handle, reset)