color texts at expect shell

Question

As the title, is there any way to use color texts at expect shell? Like the shell script echo command below.

echo -e "\033[32m Hello World"

Answer 1

I have been suffering the answer to this question for quite some time, and now I think I've finally got an answer.

How it works is to use 033 to send the < ESC> character and then [ to send ANSI escape codes separated by semicolons, however as [ is a special character it also needs to be escaped with a backslash. You can then proceed to send ANSI sequences and delimit with an m.

Example ANSI break sequences

• 0 Reset / Normal all attributes off

• 1 Bold or increased intensity

• 4 Underline: Single

• 30 Set text color Black

• 31 Set text color Red

• 32 Set text color Green

Full list can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

Example:

puts "\033\[01;31m" # This will turn text red
puts "~~~This text is red and bold\n" 
puts "\033\[0;32m" # This will turn text green
puts "This text is green and bold switched off\n"

However it doesn't seem to work with the -nonewline option, which is a tad annoying. However the send_user command seems to handle things a lot better and under control a lot better:

send_user "\033\[01;31mRed bold \033\[0;32mGreen again"

You can even combine this with variables to make the output more readable:

set green "\033\[0;32;40m"
set red "\033\[1;31m"
send_user "${red}Red bold ${green}Green again"