How to print colour/color in python?

Question

New to both Python and StackOverflow, I\'d like a little help. I\'d like to print color in Python and have Googled but with little luck :( I\'ve been confused each time and

Answer 1

If you want to print color in the IDLE shell no answer using ASCI escape codes will help you as it does not implement this feature.

There is a hack specific to IDLE that lets you write to it's PyShell object directly and specify text tags that IDLE has already defined such as "STRING" which will appear as green by default.

import sys

try:
    shell = sys.stdout.shell
except AttributeError:
    raise RuntimeError("you must run this program in IDLE")

shell.write("Wanna go explore? ","KEYWORD")
shell.write("OPTIONS","STRING")
shell.write(" : ","KEYWORD")
shell.write("Yes","DEFINITION")
shell.write(" or ","KEYWORD")
shell.write("No","COMMENT")
answer = input()

When run in IDLE will result in this prompt:

Here is a list of all valid tags for use:

print("here are all the valid tags:\n")

valid_tags = ('SYNC', 'stdin', 'BUILTIN', 'STRING', 'console', 'COMMENT', 'stdout',
              'TODO','stderr', 'hit', 'DEFINITION', 'KEYWORD', 'ERROR', 'sel')

for tag in valid_tags:
    shell.write(tag+"\n",tag)

Note that 'sel' is special that it represents the text that is selected, so it will be un-selected once something else is clicked on. As well it can be used to start some text selected for copying.

Answer 2

Clint (Command Line INterface Tools) is a good library that I've used. It's a multipurpose library for anything to do with the terminal. There are functions in there for colors, yes/no prompts, progress bars, etc.

Using Clint for colored output looks like this:

>>> from clint.textui import colored, puts
>>> puts(colored.red('red text'))
red text

Answer 3

Colors in python

A simple method to print text nicely or style text using python, without any plugin or package.

# the ANSI codes are stored in variables, making them easier to use
black = "\033[0;30m"
red = "\033[0;31m"
green = "\033[0;32m"
yellow = "\033[0;33m"
blue = "\033[0;34m"
magenta = "\033[0;35m"
cyan = "\033[0;36m"
white = "\033[0;37m"
bright_black = "\033[0;90m"
bright_red = "\033[0;91m"
bright_green = "\033[0;92m"
bright_yellow = "\033[0;93m"
bright_blue = "\033[0;94m"
bright_magenta = "\033[0;95m"
bright_cyan = "\033[0;96m"
bright_white = "\033[0;97m"

print(black + "Hello world")
print(red + "Hello world")
print(green + "Hello world")
print(blue + "Hello world")
print(yellow + "Hello world")
print(magenta + "Hello world")
print(cyan + "Hello world")
print(bright_black + "Hello world")
print(bright_red + "Hello world")
print(bright_green + "Hello world")
print(bright_blue + "Hello world")
print(bright_cyan + "Hello world")
print(bright_magenta + "Hello world")
print(bright_yellow + "Hello world")

output :

View : Colored output

Answer 4

If you're using a terminal and/or shell that support ANSI escape sequences, something like the following should work:

print("Blah blah \033[0;32mthis part will be green\033[00m blah blah.")
print("Blah blah \033[0;31mthis part will be red\033[00m blah blah.")

I can confirm that it does work in bash on Linux. See the Wikipedia page on ANSI escape codes for further details, including a comprehensive table describing the effects of different character sequences/values. I don't advocate this as a canonical solution, but it may be sufficient for your purposes.

Answer 5

I'd suggest this new library Printy which comes with an alternative function for both print() and input(). Just released version 1.2.0 as a cross-platform library.

It is based on flags so, for your case of use, you can do:

from printy import inputy
# with inline formats, this will apply a green(n)
# to the word 'OPTIONS', blue (b) to the word 'Yes', and red (r) to 
# the word No
inputy("Wanna go explore? [n]OPTIONS@ : [b]Yes@ or [r]No@")

you also can apply some validations, and the returned value would be already converted to boolean (or depending of the specified type)

It let you do more interesting things, Check it out: Printy on github

Answer 6

Check out the curses module. This will replace the print statements and give you complete control over the text positioning and attributes on your screen.