Download and docs:
    http://pypi.python.org/pypi/colorama
Development:
    http://code.google.com/p/colorama

Description
===========

Makes ANSI escape character sequences for producing colored terminal text work
under MS Windows.

ANSI escape character sequences have long been used to produce colored terminal
text on Unix and Macs. Colorama makes this work on Windows, too. It also
provides some shortcuts to help generate ANSI sequences, and works fine in
conjunction with any other ANSI sequence generation library, such as Termcolor
(http://pypi.python.org/pypi/termcolor.)

This has the upshot of providing a simple cross-platform API for printing
colored terminal text from Python, and has the happy side-effect that existing
applications or libraries which use ANSI sequences to produce colored output on
Linux or Macs can now also work on Windows, simply by calling
``colorama.init()``.

A demo script in the source code repository prints some colored text using
ANSI sequences. Compare its output under Gnome-terminal's built in ANSI
handling, versus on Windows Command-Prompt using Colorama:

.. image:: http://colorama.googlecode.com/hg/screenshots/ubuntu-demo.png
    :width: 661
    :height: 357
    :alt: ANSI sequences on Ubuntu under gnome-terminal.

.. image:: http://colorama.googlecode.com/hg/screenshots/windows-demo.png
    :width: 668
    :height: 325
    :alt: Same ANSI sequences on Windows, using Colorama.

These screengrabs make it clear that Colorama on Windows does not support
ANSI 'dim text': it looks the same as 'normal text'.


Dependencies
============

None, other than Python. Tested on Python 2.5.5, 2.6.5, 2.7 & 3.1.2.


Usage
=====

Initialisation
--------------

Applications should initialise Colorama using::

    from colorama import init
    init()

If you are on Windows, the call to ``init()`` will start filtering ANSI escape
sequences out of any text sent to stdout or stderr, and will replace them with
equivalent Win32 calls.

Calling ``init()`` has no effect on other platforms (unless you request other
optional functionality, see keyword args below.) The intention is that
applications can call ``init()`` unconditionally on all platforms, after which
ANSI output should just work.


Colored Output
--------------

Cross-platform printing of colored text can then be done using Colorama's
constant shorthand for ANSI escape sequences::

    from colorama import Fore, Back, Style
    print Fore.RED + 'some red text'
    print Back.GREEN + and with a green background'
    print Style.DIM + 'and in dim text'
    print + Fore.RESET + Back.RESET + Style.RESET_ALL
    print 'back to normal now'

or simply by manually printing ANSI sequences from your own code::

    print '/033[31m' + 'some red text'
    print '/033[30m' # and reset to default color

or Colorama can be used happily in conjunction with existing ANSI libraries
such as Termcolor::

    from colorama import init
    from termcolor import colored

    # use Colorama to make Termcolor work on Windows too
    init()

    # then use Termcolor for all colored text output
    print colored('Hello, World!', 'green', 'on_red')

Available formatting constants are::

    Fore: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, RESET.
    Back: BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, MAGENTA, CYAN, WHITE, RESET.
    Style: DIM, NORMAL, BRIGHT, RESET_ALL

Style.RESET_ALL resets foreground, background and brightness. Colorama will
perform this reset automatically on program exit.


Init Keyword Args
-----------------

``init()`` accepts some kwargs to override default behaviour.

init(autoreset=False):
    If you find yourself repeatedly sending reset sequences to turn off color
    changes at the end of every print, then ``init(autoreset=True)`` will
    automate that::

        from colorama import init
        init(autoreset=True)
        print Fore.RED + 'some red text'
        print 'automatically back to default color again'

init(strip=None):
    Pass ``True`` or ``False`` to override whether ansi codes should be
    stripped from the output. The default behaviour is to strip if on Windows.

init(convert=None):
    Pass ``True`` or ``False`` to override whether to convert ansi codes in the
    output into win32 calls. The default behaviour is to convert if on Windows
    and output is to a tty (terminal).

init(wrap=True):
    On Windows, colorama works by replacing ``sys.stdout`` and ``sys.stderr``
    with proxy objects, which override the .write() method to do their work. If
    this wrapping causes you problems, then this can be disabled by passing
    ``init(wrap=False)``. The default behaviour is to wrap if autoreset or
    strip or convert are True.

    When wrapping is disabled, colored printing on non-Windows platforms will
    continue to work as normal. To do cross-platform colored output, you can
    use Colorama's ``AnsiToWin32`` proxy directly::

        from colorama import init, AnsiToWin32
        init(wrap=False)
        stream = AnsiToWin32(sys.stderr).stream
        print >>stream, Fore.BLUE + 'blue text on stderr'    


Status & Known Problems
=======================

I've personally only tested it on WinXP (CMD, Console2) and Ubuntu
(gnome-terminal, xterm), although it sounds like others are using it on other
platforms too.

See outstanding issues and wishlist at:
http://code.google.com/p/colorama/issues/list

If anything doesn't work for you, or doesn't do what you expected or hoped for,
I'd *love* to hear about it on that issues list.


Recognised ANSI Sequences
=========================

ANSI sequences generally take the form:

    ESC [ <param> ; <param> ... <command>

Where <param> is an integer, and <command> is a single letter. Zero or more 
params are passed to a <command>. If no params are passed, it is generally
synonymous with passing a single zero. No spaces exist in the sequence, they
have just been inserted here to make it easy to read.

The only ANSI sequences that colorama converts into win32 calls are::

    ESC [ 0 m       # reset all (colors and brightness)
    ESC [ 1 m       # bright
    ESC [ 2 m       # dim (looks same as normal brightness)
    ESC [ 22 m      # normal brightness

    # FOREGROUND:
    ESC [ 30 m      # black
    ESC [ 31 m      # red
    ESC [ 32 m      # green
    ESC [ 33 m      # yellow
    ESC [ 34 m      # blue
    ESC [ 35 m      # magenta
    ESC [ 36 m      # cyan
    ESC [ 37 m      # white
    ESC [ 39 m      # reset

    # BACKGROUND
    ESC [ 40 m      # black
    ESC [ 41 m      # red
    ESC [ 42 m      # green
    ESC [ 43 m      # yellow
    ESC [ 44 m      # blue
    ESC [ 45 m      # magenta
    ESC [ 46 m      # cyan
    ESC [ 47 m      # white
    ESC [ 49 m      # reset

Multiple numeric params to the 'm' command can be combined into a single
sequence, eg::

    ESC [ 36 ; 45 ; 1 m     # bright cyan text on magenta background

All other ANSI sequences of the form ``ESC [ <param> ; <param> ... <command>``
are silently stripped from the output on Windows.

Any other form of ANSI sequence, such as single-character codes or alternative
initial characters, are not recognised nor stripped.


Development
===========

Running tests requires:

- Michael Foord's 'mock' module to be installed.
- Either to be run under Python2.7 or 3.1 stdlib unittest, or to have Michael
  Foord's 'unittest2' module to be installed.

unittest2 test discovery doesn't work for colorama, so I use 'nose'::

    nosetests -s

The -s is required because 'nosetests' otherwise applies a proxy of its own to
stdout, which confuses the unit tests.


Thanks
======
Daniel Griffith for multiple fabulous patches.
Oscar Lester for valuable fix to stop ANSI chars being sent to non-tty output.
Roger Binns, for many suggestions, valuable feedback, & bug reports.
Tim Golden for thought and much appreciated feedback on the initial idea.


Changes
=======

0.2
    Merge in changes from Daniel Griffith:
        Add ANSI cursor positioning & partial support for clear screen.
        Patch submitted by Oscar Lester, don't send RESET_ALL to non-tty.
        Demos split into separate files and moved into their own directory.
    Tweak sys.path in demos so they run against local source, not installed
    version of Colorama.
0.1.18
    Fix README (no such attr as Fore.DEFAULT, etc), kindly reported by nodakai.
0.1.17
    Prevent printing of garbage ANSI codes upon installing with pip
0.1.16
    Re-upload to fix previous error. Make clean now removes old MANIFEST.
0.1.15
    Completely broken. Distribution was empty due to leftover invalid MANIFEST
    file from building on a different platform.
    Fix python3 incompatibility kindly reported by G |uumlaut| nter Kolousek
0.1.14
    Fix hard-coded reset to white-on-black colors. Fore.RESET, Back.RESET
    and Style.RESET_ALL now revert to the colors as they were when init()
    was called. Some lessons hopefully learned about testing prior to release.
0.1.13
    Completely broken: barfed when installed using pip.
0.1.12
    Completely broken: contained no source code. double oops.
0.1.11
    Completely broken: fatal import errors on Ubuntu. oops.
0.1.10
    Stop emulating 'bright' text with bright backgrounds.
    Display 'normal' text using win32 normal foreground instead of bright.
    Drop support for 'dim' text.
0.1.9
    Fix incompatibility with Python 2.5 and earlier.
    Remove setup.py dependency on setuptools, now uses stdlib distutils.
0.1.8
    Fix ghastly errors all over the place on Ubuntu.
    Add init kwargs 'convert' and 'strip', which supercede the old 'wrap'.
0.1.7
    Python 3 compatible.
    Fix: Now strips ansi on windows without necessarily converting it to
    win32 calls (eg. if output is not a tty.)
    Fix: Flaky interaction of interleaved ansi sent to stdout and stderr.
    Improved demo.sh (hg checkout only.)
0.1.6
    Fix ansi sequences with no params now default to parmlist of [0].
    Fix flaky behaviour of autoreset and reset_all atexit.
    Fix stacking of repeated atexit calls - now just called once.
    Fix ghastly import problems while running tests.
    'demo.py' (hg checkout only) now demonstrates autoreset and reset atexit.
    Provide colorama.VERSION, used by setup.py.
    Tests defanged so they no longer actually change terminal color when run.
0.1.5
    Now works on Ubuntu.
0.1.4
    Implemented RESET_ALL on application exit
0.1.3
    Implemented init(wrap=False)
0.1.2
    Implemented init(autoreset=True)
0.1.1
    Minor tidy
0.1
    Works on Windows for foreground color, background color, bright or dim

.. |uumlaut| unicode:: U+00FC .. u with umlaut
   :trim:

