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print color strings?

Michael Hudson Michael.Hudson at p98.f112.n480.z2.fidonet.org
Thu Jul 1 21:17:47 EDT 1999 
From: Michael Hudson <mwh21 at cam.ac.uk>

Gerrit Holl <gerrit.holl at pobox.com> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> is there an easy way to print color strings in python?
> 
> A function like printcolor('brightyellow', 'red', 'spam'), that finds
> out on what kind of terminal you are and prints it to stdout?

That sort of finding out is what terminfo is for; there's no Python
interface that I know of (such a beast shouldn't be too hard to write,
but a bit pointless, I suspect). However there is the `tput' program;

os.system("tput setaf 1")

should turn your foreground colour red. 

Read the terminfo man pages for more codes.

You'd probably want to cache the escape codes rather than spinning a
new process each time you need one.

codes['redf'] = os.popen("tput setaf 1").read()
codes['redb'] = os.popen("tput setab 1").read()
codes['greenf']=os.popen("tput setaf 2").read()
...

and so on.

I'm certainly not an expert on such matters; reading man pages for
tput, terminfo and term and playing around will get you exactly where
I've got to.

All terribly unix-centric, of course.

HTH
Michael
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