Is it possible to print using different colors in ipython's Notebook?

Question

The notebook has, of course, its own syntax highlighting. So I would be careful when using colour elsewhere, just to avoid making things harder to read for yourself or someone else (e.g., output should simply be in black, but you get parts in red if there is an exception).

But (to my surprise), it appears that you can use ANSI escape codes (even in the browser). At least, I could:

On the default Python prompt:

>>> print("\x1b[31m\"red\"\x1b[0m")
"red"

In the notebook:

In [28]: print("\x1b[31m\"red\"\x1b[0m")
         "red"

(Obviously, I cheated here with the syntax highlighting of SO so that "red" is printed in the colour red in both examples. I don't think SO allows a user to set a colour for text.)

I wouldn't really know another way to get colours.

For more on ANSI escape codes, I'd suggest the Wikipedia article. And if you find the above to verbose, you can of course write a wrapper function around this.

You can use this library termcolor and you can get all other official libraries of python in PyPi.

1. pip install termcolor
2. then goto ipython

Code

from termcolor import colored
print(colored('hello', 'red'), colored('world', 'green'))
print(colored("hello red world", 'red'))

Output:

hello world
hello red world

The first argument is what you want to print on console and second argument use that color.

See the documentation in pypi.python.org for more information

Here's a quick hack:

from IPython.display import HTML as html_print

def cstr(s, color='black'):
    return "<text style=color:{}>{}</text>".format(color, s)

left, word, right = 'foo' , 'abc' , 'bar'
html_print(cstr(' '.join([left, cstr(word, color='red'), right]), color='black') )

[out]:

If you just want a single color: html_print(cstr('abc', 'red'))

Similar to what @alvas mentioned but simpler

from IPython.display import Markdown
display (Markdown('this is in <span style="color: #ff0000">red</span> color.'))