On Apr 16, 10:28 am, Jonathan Hartley <tart...@tartley.com> wrote: > Hi, > > It irks me that I know of no simple cross-platform way to print > colored terminal text from Python. > > As I understand it, printing ANSI escape codes (as wrapped nicely by > module termcolor and others) works on Macs and *nix, but only works on > Windows if one has installed the ANSI.SYS device driver, which most > users have not. However, on Windows, there is an alternative method, > which is to make win32 calls via ctypes. > > I'd like to try and unite these different implementations under a > single cross-platform API. Has this been done already? I understand > that the detailed capabilities of the two implementations (eg. dim/ > bright colors) might not map neatly, but at least for simple colored > text, it should be OK. > > I'm playing with ideas of what API to expose. My favourite one is to > simply embed ANSI codes in the stream to be printed. Then this will > work as-is on Mac and *nix. To make it work on Windows, printing could > be done to a file0-like object which wraps stdout: > > class ColorStream(object): > > def __init__(self, wrapped): > self.wrapped = wrapped > > def write(self, text): > # magic goes here > self.wrapped.write(text) > > def __getattr__(self, name): > return getattr(self.wrapped, name) > > term = ColorTerm(sys.stdout) > print <<term, ANSI.GREEN + "hello" > > The idea being that in place of 'magic goes here', there will be code > that, on Windows, searches 'text' for ANSI escape codes, strips them > from the text, and converts them into the appropriate win32 calls. > > For extra nasty magic, either the module or the user of the module > could wrap sys.stdout globally: > > sys.stdout = ColoredStream(sys.stdout) > > Then print statements in the user's code would simply be: > > print ANSI.GREEN + "hello" > > and this would work on all platforms. > > No doubt there are many problems with these ideas. I would love to > hear about them. Many thanks.
Sorry, I forgot to mention: The reason I like this idea is that, in theory, all existing libraries like termcolor will then work, unmodified, on all platforms. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
