Playing with Strings and Colors in Python

http://thelivingpearl.com/2012/12/28/playing-around-with-strings-and-python/

by barakstout • 14 years ago

36 15 14 years ago

RyanMcGreal2• 14 years ago

Python is a great language for iterating over collections - lists, tuples, dicts, sets, etc. - and all those elifs don't look very Pythonic to me. Let's clean it up a little:

    colors = ('grey', 'red', 'green', 'yellow', 'blue', 'magenta', 'cyan')
    for char in string:
        print termcolor.colored(char, colors[string.index(char)%7])

absherwin• 14 years ago

Better yet use enumerate to save looking up the character index:

    for i,char in enumerate(string):
        print termcolor.colored(char, colors[i%7])

barakstout4• 14 years ago

Both would work just fine. Good Points.

hythloday• 14 years ago

You can get rid of that unpleasant indexing:

(3.2)

    from itertools import cycle
    for colour, character in zip(cycle(colours), string):
      print(termcolor.colored(character, colour))

(2.7)

    from itertools import cycle, izip
    for colour, character in izip(cycle(colours, string):
      print termcolor.colored(character, colour)

ses4j• 14 years ago

This is much much much more entry-level than most of the content posted to HN. Maybe a "Beginners: " label would be appropriate...

barakstout4• 14 years ago

Maybe it will. Noted for future reference.

jevinskie• 14 years ago

I would hardly consider myself a python beginner and I was delighted to read this article. I now know how to add some useful "syntax highlighting" to my personal CLI utilities!

Osmose• 14 years ago

I prefer Blessings[1] for terminal colors/positioning/etc (except it's limited to platforms that support curses):

    from blessings import Terminal
    t = Terminal()
    print t.bold, 'Hi there!', t.normal
    print t.bold_red_on_bright_green('It hurts my eyes!')
    with t.location(0, t.height - 1):
        print 'This is at the bottom.'

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/blessings/

Falling3• 14 years ago

The first paragraph read strangely to me... like bot generated content. Like the sentence:

"Python can be written as an algorithm that you can execute."

mmcnickle• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if you were looking for any criticism. I found the way that the way the ATTRIBUTES, HIGHLIGHTS and COLORS dicts are defined to be unnecessarily difficult to read:

    ATTRIBUTES = dict(
        list(zip([
            'bold',
            'dark',
            '',
            'underline',
            'blink',
            '',
            'reverse',
            'concealed'
            ],
            list(range(1, 9))
            ))
        )
    del ATTRIBUTES['']

It may feel like you are being more DRY by not typing the numerical values out. But this is data and it's perfectly fine to explicitly define them. The result is straightforward, more compact and easier to read as a result:

    ATTRIBUTES = {
        'bold': 1,
        'dark': 2,
        'underline': 4,
        'blink': 5,
        'reverse': 7,
        'concealed': 8
    }

viraptor• 14 years ago

Or even this if you don't want explicit numbers, but don't want that many zip/list/dict/range/etc.:

    attrs = ['bold', 'dark', '', 'underline', 'blink', '', 'reverse', 'concealed']
    
    ATTRIBUTES = dict((k,v) for v,k in enumerate(attrs, 1) if k)
    # or
    ATTRIBUTES = dict(zip(itertools.count(1), attrs))

Playing with Strings and Colors in Python

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