ANSI colors cross platform

Question

I am trying to write for both NT and POSIX (my two usual platforms) and have come up with the code below. The clrs code I refer to is apparently from blender build scripts, I discovered it on this SO post. They called the class bcolors but I wanted to reduce clutter so I renamed it.

But the main class is what I've written that determines the os before printing. Prints are called, for example, via PRN.cyan("some string").

For this to work I import colorama:

from colorama import init, Fore, Back, Style
init()

The PRN class that handles the print calls:

class PRN:
    @staticmethod
    def cyan(p_str):
        """print some text with cyan foreground"""
        if os.name == 'nt':
            # we'll try the Colorama option but if it fails we can
            # change the global variable for colours.
            if coloursOn:
                sys.stdout.write(Fore.CYAN + p_str + Fore.RESET)
            else:
                sys.stdout.write(p_str)
        else:
            # try Deez1.clrs for posix environment
            sys.stdout.write(clrs.cyan + p_str + clrs.ENDC)

If colorama doesn't work on a Windows system for some reason I can change the global boolean coloursOn.

Is this an incredibly klutzy/dumb implementation? From what I've read, so far, cross platform capability for ANSI color printing has only gotten shakier, not simpler.

Answer 1

First off, "cross platform capability for ANSI color printing" doesn't quite make sense (if I understand correctly). ANSI color printing is only going to work on terminals that are ANSI compatible.

Therefore, it doesn't really matter what OS it is: if it's an ANSI terminal, you can use ANSI colored output.

Therefore, you can remove the checking of the operating system.

Note: according to this answer,

"All modern terminal emulators use ANSI escape codes to show colours and other things."

---

Judging by the name of the method your presented and the context of the code, you have created a separate method for each color.

1. This sounds like you are repeating yourself a lot.

2. It's not very flexible for the code that is using your library.

I recommend that you create a single method print_color_string that takes a string and the color to print.

def print_color_string(str, color):
    ansi_color = getattr(Fore, color)
    if ansi_color:
        sys.stdout.write(ansi_color + p_str + Fore.RESET)
    else:
        # throw error because color is not a valid color