printing bold, colored, etc., text in ipython qtconsole

Question

I'm trying to get text to display as bold, or in colors, or possibly in italics, in ipython's qtconsole.

I found this link: How do I print bold text in Python?, and used the first and second answers, but in qtconsole, only the underlining option works.

I try:

print '\033[1m' + 'Hello World!' + '\033[0m'

And get:

Hello World!

(No boldface). The colors don't work either. But:

print '\033[4m' + 'Hello World!' + '\033[0m'

And get:

Hello World!

With underlining.

This is only in the qtconsole. Running ipython just in the terminal, it works to do boldface and color in this way.

There were other options suggested in that link and another, Print in terminal with colors using Python?, linked from it, but they all seem more complex, and to use more elaborate packages, than seems necessary for what I want to do, which is simply to get qtconsole to display like the ordinary terminal does.

Does anyone know what's going on? Is this simply a limitation of the qtconsole?

Answer 1

In Jupyter Notebooks, one clean way of solving this problem is using markdown:

from IPython.display import Markdown, display
def printmd(string):
    display(Markdown(string))

And then do something like:

printmd("**bold text**")

Of course, this is great for bold, italics, etc., but markdown itself does not implement color. However, you can place html in your markdown, and get something like this:

printmd("<span style='color:red'>Red text</span>")

You could also wrap this in the printmd function :

def printmd(string, color=None):
    colorstr = "<span style='color:{}'>{}</span>".format(color, string)
    display(Markdown(colorstr))

And then do cool things like

printmd("**bold and blue**", color="blue")

For the colors, you can use the hexadecimal notation too (eg. color = "#00FF00" for green)

To clarify, although we use markdown, this is a code cell: you can do things like:

for c in ('green', 'blue', 'red', 'yellow'):
    printmd("Writing in {}".format(c), color=c)

Of course, a drawback of this method is the reliance on being within a Jupyter notebook.