[Solved] is it possible to add colors to python output? [duplicate]

Question

IDLE’s console does not support ANSI escape sequences, or any other form of escapes for coloring your output.

You can learn how to talk to IDLE’s console directly instead of just treating it like normal stdout and printing to it (which is how it does things like color-coding your syntax), but that’s pretty complicated. The idle documentation just tells you the basics of using IDLE itself, and its idlelib library has no documentation (well, there is a single line of documentation—”(New in 2.3) Support library for the IDLE development environment.”—if you know where to find it, but that isn’t very helpful). So, you need to either read the source, or do a whole lot of trial and error, to even get started.

Alternatively, you can run your script from the command line instead of from IDLE, in which case you can use whatever escape sequences your terminal handles. Most modern terminals will handle at least basic 16/8-color ANSI. Many will handle 16/16, or the expanded xterm-256 color sequences, or even full 24-bit colors. (I believe gnome-terminal is the default for Ubuntu, and in its default configuration it will handle xterm-256, but that’s really a question for SuperUser or AskUbuntu.)

Learning to read the termcap entries to know which codes to enter is complicated… but if you only care about a single console—or are willing to just assume “almost everything handles basic 16/8-color ANSI, and anything that doesn’t, I don’t care about”, you can ignore that part and just hardcode them based on, e.g., this page.

Once you know what you want to emit, it’s just a matter of putting the codes in the strings before printing them.

But there are libraries that can make this all easier for you. One really nice library, which comes built in with Python, is curses. This lets you take over the terminal and do a full-screen GUI, with colors and spinning cursors and anything else you want. It is a little heavy-weight for simple uses, of course. Other libraries can be found by searching PyPI, as usual.

Accepted Answer

IDLE’s console does not support ANSI escape sequences, or any other form of escapes for coloring your output.

You can learn how to talk to IDLE’s console directly instead of just treating it like normal stdout and printing to it (which is how it does things like color-coding your syntax), but that’s pretty complicated. The idle documentation just tells you the basics of using IDLE itself, and its idlelib library has no documentation (well, there is a single line of documentation—”(New in 2.3) Support library for the IDLE development environment.”—if you know where to find it, but that isn’t very helpful). So, you need to either read the source, or do a whole lot of trial and error, to even get started.

Alternatively, you can run your script from the command line instead of from IDLE, in which case you can use whatever escape sequences your terminal handles. Most modern terminals will handle at least basic 16/8-color ANSI. Many will handle 16/16, or the expanded xterm-256 color sequences, or even full 24-bit colors. (I believe gnome-terminal is the default for Ubuntu, and in its default configuration it will handle xterm-256, but that’s really a question for SuperUser or AskUbuntu.)

Learning to read the termcap entries to know which codes to enter is complicated… but if you only care about a single console—or are willing to just assume “almost everything handles basic 16/8-color ANSI, and anything that doesn’t, I don’t care about”, you can ignore that part and just hardcode them based on, e.g., this page.

Once you know what you want to emit, it’s just a matter of putting the codes in the strings before printing them.

But there are libraries that can make this all easier for you. One really nice library, which comes built in with Python, is curses. This lets you take over the terminal and do a full-screen GUI, with colors and spinning cursors and anything else you want. It is a little heavy-weight for simple uses, of course. Other libraries can be found by searching PyPI, as usual.