Makes ANSI escape character sequences for producing colored terminal
text and cursor positioning work under MS Windows.
ANSI escape character sequences have long been used to produce colored
terminal text and cursor positioning on Unix and Macs. Colorama
makes this work on Windows, too, by wrapping stdout, stripping ANSI
sequences it finds (which otherwise show up as gobbledygook in your
output), and converting them into the appropriate win32 calls to
modify the state of the terminal. On other platforms, Colorama does
nothing.
Colorama also provides some shortcuts to help generate ANSI sequences
but works fine in conjunction with any other ANSI sequence generation
library, such as Termcolor (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/termcolor.)
This has the upshot of providing a simple cross-platform API for
printing colored terminal text from Python, and has the happy
side-effect that existing applications or libraries which use ANSI
sequences to produce colored output on Linux or Macs can now also work
on Windows, simply by calling colorama.init().
An alternative approach is to install 'ansi.sys' on Windows machines,
which provides the same behaviour for all applications running in
terminals. Colorama is intended for situations where that isn't easy
(e.g. maybe your app doesn't have an installer.)
Demo scripts in the source code repository prints some colored text
using ANSI sequences. Compare their output under Gnome-terminal's
built in ANSI handling, versus on Windows Command-Prompt using
Colorama.
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