Playing with Strings and Colors in Python(thelivingpearl.com)

36 pointsby barakstout14 yıl önce15 comments

Playing with Strings and Colors in Python

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

5 comments

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])

absherwin14 yıl önce

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

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

hythloday14 yıl önce

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)

barakstout14 yıl önce

Sweet. Thanks.

barakstout14 yıl önce

Both would work just fine. Good Points.

andrewcooke14 yıl önce

the first doesn't work correctly for all strings (those with duplicate characters). the second is the right way to do it.

RyanMcGreal14 yıl önce

Good point. I should know better than to dash off a quick code sample on HN without first running a test suite. :)

barakstout14 yıl önce

Both versions will work just fine. And number mod 7 will give an index of 0 to 6, which covers any color index from the colors tuple. Also, I tested it out just in case.

EDIT: The only issue is that if the string has a repeated letter it will be the same color.

Osmose14 yıl önce

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/

ses4j14 yıl önce

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

jevinskie14 yıl önce

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!

barakstout14 yıl önce

Maybe it will. Noted for future reference.

mmcnickle14 yıl önce

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
    }

viraptor14 yıl önce

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))

Falling314 yıl önce

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."