How does Pywikipedia manage colours on the command line?

Question

I have always thought that there is no possible formatting on the command line, as everything I have read says.

However, I recently discovered that pywikipedia (a python bot framework for automatically editing wikipedia-style wikis) can output text to the command line (the normal windows cmd.exe) in different colours!

This is the python syntax:

import wikipedia
wikipedia.output(u"\03{lightpurple}"+s+"\03{default}")

You have to use wikipedia.output() (or pywikibot.output()) but not just print.

The online pywikipedia repository (around line 7990) gives a short explanation:

text can contain special sequences to create colored output. These
consist of the escape character \03 and the color name in curly braces,
e. g. \03{lightpurple}. \03{default} resets the color.

I think it is probably to do with this line:

ui.output(text, toStdout = toStdout)

But I can't find any reference to a ui class.

So how does Pywikipedia manage it?

Answer 1

I don't know if you can use the ANSI Code on Windows.
But in Python you could write make it like that :

 >>> print "\033[0;32m"+ "Green" +"\033[0m"
 Green

I saw it here.

Answer 2

I think it is probably to do with this line:

ui.output(text, toStdout = toStdout)

But I can't find any reference to a ui class.

How does Pywikibot manage colors on the command line

Indeed this is tricky.

You have found the color codes already like \03{lightblue} an \03{default}; all of them can be found here. There is also a function color_format() which automatically handles the escape sequence. The UI class has the private _print() method which handles all color stuff and delegates the hardware sequence to the encounter_color() method. There are implementations for Windows and Linux yet.

But you are right, there is no direct reference to terminal interface UI class.

There is a function set_interface() in bot module which assigns the UI class to the ui userinterface used by Pywikibot. The 'terminal' module for userinterfaces_terminal_interface is set inside config.py which is the Pywikibot configuarion file which can be overridden by a user_config.py. There is also a buffer_interface mostly used by tests. Other interfaces from older branch like cgi, tkinter, wxpython aren't supported currently.