Colorize Terminal Text with Typewriter effect in Python

Question

I am currently using python 2.7, and I am having a little bit of trouble coding this idea I have. I know it is easy enough to color text in the terminal in python 2.7 with libraries like colorama or termcolor, but these methods don't quite work in the way I am trying to use.

You see, I am trying to create a text based adventure game, that not only has colored text, but also gives a quick typewriter-style effect when doing so. I have the typewriter effect down pat, but anytime I try to integrate it with a colorizing library the code fails, giving me the raw ASCII character instead of the actual color.

import sys
from time import sleep
from colorama import init, Fore
init()

def tprint(words):
for char in words:
    sleep(0.015)
    sys.stdout.write(char)
    sys.stdout.flush()

tprint(Fore.RED = "This is just a color test.")

If you run the code, you will see that the typewriter effect works, but the color effect does not. Is there any way I can "embed" the color into the text so that sys.stdout.write will show the color with it?

Thank You

EDIT

I think I may have found a workaround, but it is kind of a pain to change the color of individual words with this method. Apparently, if you use colorama to set the ASCII color before you call the tprint function, it will print in whatever the last set color was.

Here is the example code:

print(Fore.RED)
tprint("This is some example Text.")

I would love any feedback/improvements on my code, as I would really like to find a way to call the Fore library within the tprint function without causing ASCII errors.

Answer 1

TL;DR: Prepend your string with the desired Fore.COLOUR and don't forget to Fore.RESET at the end.

First of all - cool typewriter function!

In your workaround you are merely printing nothing (i.e. '') in red, then by default the next text you print is also in red. All text that follows will be in red until you Fore.RESET the colour (or exit).

A better (more pythonic?) way is to directly and explicitly build your strings with the colour you want.

Here's a similar example, pre-pending Fore.RED and appending Fore.RESET to the string before sending to your tprint() function:

import sys
from time import sleep
from colorama import init, Fore
init()


def tprint(words):
    for char in words:
        sleep(0.015)
        sys.stdout.write(char)
        sys.stdout.flush()

red_string = Fore.RED + "This is a red string\n" + Fore.RESET

tprint(red_string)    # prints red_string in red font with typewriter effect

Setting aside your tprint() function for simplicity's sake, this method of colour-typing also works for concatenation of strings:

from colorama import init, Fore
init()

red_fish = Fore.RED + 'red fish!' + Fore.RESET
blue_fish = Fore.BLUE + ' blue fish!' + Fore.RESET

print red_fish + blue_fish    # prints red, then blue, and resets to default colour

new_fish = red_fish + blue_fish    # concatenate the coloured strings

print new_fish    # prints red, then blue, and resets to default colour

Going further - to build a single string with multiple colours:

from colorama import init, Fore
init()

rainbow = Fore.RED + 'red ' + Fore.YELLOW + 'yellow ' \
+ Fore.GREEN + 'green ' + Fore.BLUE + 'blue ' \
+ Fore.MAGENTA + 'magenta ' + Fore.RESET + 'and then back to default colour.'

print rainbow    # prints in each named colour then resets to default

This is my first answer on Stack so I don't have the reputation required to post images of my terminal window output.

The official colorama docs have more useful examples and explanations. Hope I haven't missed too much, good luck!