Color ouput with Swift command line tool

Question

I'm writing a command line tool with Swift and I'm having trouble displaying colors in my shell. I'm using the following code:

println("\033[31;32mhey\033[39;39m")

or even

NSFileHandle.fileHandleWithStandardOutput().writeData("\033[31;32mhey\033[39;39m".dataUsingEncoding(NSASCIIStringEncoding, allowLossyConversion: true)!)

It works when I use a simple echo in php (the text is displayed in green) but is there a reason it doesn't work in a Swift command line tool?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Swift has built in unicode support. This invalidates using of back slash. So that I use color codes with "\u{}" syntax. Here is a println code which works perfectly on terminal.

// \u{001B}[\(attribute code like bold, dim, normal);\(color code)m

// Color codes
// black   30
// red     31
// green   32
// yellow  33
// blue    34
// magenta 35
// cyan    36
// white   37

println("\u{001B}[0;33myellow")

Hope it helps.