Today I tackled a very interesting request from my mentors. I had been tasked with changing the colors of print statements in the terminal from the defaults to red based on a conditional.

The conditional logic wasn’t the important or interesting part of the problem since it would basically boil down to a True or False value eventually. The interesting part was trying to find a way to override the default stdout colors.

Once I overcame my initial thoughts about this being an impossible to achieve, I starting looking into python modules that could wrap print statements in various colors and display them to the user.

I found two packages that seemed promising (Termcolor, and Colorama) but they hid their internal workings from me, and forced me to rely on code that I didn’t own. The second package (Colorama) mentioned something about ‘ANSI escape character sequences’, and displayed a strange looking code ('\033[31m').

I promptly googled ‘ANSI escape character sequences’ and found this excellent resource ascii-table.com. Using this as a guide, I was able to decipher the riddle of the terminal, and make some really cool outputs which you can check out here.

The key to getting everything working was to change the values of the ‘graphics mode’. The ‘graphics mode’ is in charge of how text is displayed on the screen.