CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-3.xcolorspython-idle
user4728253
user4728253

Reputation:

How do I print colored text in IDLE's terminal?

This is very easily a duplicate question--because it is. However, there are very many inadequate answers to this (e.g. try curses! -- pointing to a 26 page documentation).

I just want to print text in a color other than blue when I'm outputting in IDLE. Is it possible? What's an easy way to do this? I'm running Python 3.6 on Windows.

Please explain with an example.

(I have found that ANSI codes do not work inside IDLE, only on the terminal.)

Upvotes: 8

Views: 27011

Answers (5)

ABHIJITH Boppe
ABHIJITH Boppe

Reputation: 103

You can use the clrprint module to print color text in idle, Terminal and Powershell too.

Install:

pip install clrprint

Usage:

from clrprint import *
clrhelp()  # to see colors available
user_input = clrinput('INPUT MESSAGE', clr='green')  # just like input()
clrprint('YOURTEXT', user_input, clr='color')  # just like print()

Upvotes: 6

Juan T
Juan T

Reputation: 1219

Put this at the "start" of your code:

import sys

try:
    color = sys.stdout.shell
except AttributeError:
    raise RuntimeError("Use IDLE")

And then use color.write(YourText,Color) for "printing":

color.write("Hi, are you called Miharu461? \n","KEYWORD")
color.write("Yes","STRING")
color.write(" or ","KEYWORD")
color.write("No\n","COMMENT")

This prints:

Prints

Note: this does NOT automatically puts the enter (like in the print function/statement). So, when you are printing put \n at the end of the last string to put it.

The "Colors" you can put are: SYNC, stdin, BUILTIN, STRING, console, COMMENT, stdout, TODO, stderr, hit, DEFINITION, KEYWORD, ERROR, and sel.

Note 2: This is dependent of the color scheme you are using for IDLE. So I recommend you to use it for highlighting, and not for making a program for asking what in color is some word.

Upvotes: 19

AcK
AcK

Reputation: 2133

According to Why does writing to stdout in console append the number of characters written, in Python 3? "... write will also return the number of characters (actually, bytes, try sys.stdout.write('へllö')) As the python console prints the return value of each expression to stdout, the return value is appended to the actual printed value."

Use

_ = color.write("Hello world","COMMENT")

to "eat up" the extra output. _ is a "throwaway" variable, see What is the purpose of the single underscore “_” variable in Python?

Upvotes: 2

Coder
Coder

Reputation: 1

The strnage output of the length is with the return keyword, and NORMAL is also a color

Upvotes: 0

yawn
yawn

Reputation: 1

The problem I faced was how to output error messages in IDLE properly, since sys.exc_info() is printed like normal output while traceback.print_exc() is a bit of too long and detailed. So, I just want to print the Exception in red color like "traceback".

Thanks the top anwser for letting me learn about specifying the type of my messages with write(). Accidentally, I've found another method that meets my demmand by simplely adding file=sys.stderr while print(). Then I'll get a striking but brief error messages. An example in python 3.6: 

import sys
try:
    1/0
except Exception as e:
    print(repr(e), file=sys.stderr)

Upvotes: -1

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