Format color (instead of simply print colored to stream)

[Qix-]

• PrettyPrinter version: 0.18.0
• Python version: 3.7.4
• Operating System: MacOS

Description

It doesn't appear that there is a cpformat-like function to format a colored string (with ansi styles, etc.). I wouldn't mind much if it weren't for the fact that user-defined classes show up as default object stubs (e.g. <SomeClass object>) and the __repr__ magic method only supports returning strings.

This makes it nearly impossible to have a nicely formatted class instance when consumed by prettyprinter.

[epmoyer]

Until this shows up in the API, you can easily create your own cpformat() function by wrapping cpprint(), redirecting it's stream output to a StringIO stream to capture it, and then returning the text as a string.

It turns out that prettyprinter's own pformat() is essentially implemented the same way internally.

Put the code below into a cprettyprinter.py file:

"""Colorized prettyprinter format

Implements cpformat() to return a colorized pretty printed formatted string.
As of 0.17.0 the prettyprinter library does not yet implement a cpformat() function.
"""
from prettyprinter import cpprint
from io import StringIO


def cpformat(object, **kwargs):
    """Return a pretty printed colorized representation of the object as a str.

    Args:
        object: The object to format.
        Any other keyword arguments supported by prettyprinter's cpprint() function.

    Returns:
        A colorized representation of the object as a str.
    """
    output = StringIO()
    cpprint(object, stream=output, **kwargs)
    return output.getvalue()

And use it like this:

Added bonus:
I always use the colorama library to create colored text in Python. For some reason (which I haven't gotten to the bottom of) if you init colorama with colorama.init(autoreset=True) it modifies your stdout in a way that inhibits prettyprinter's cpprint() from working (i.e. the output renders uncolored). But printing the output of cpformat() (e.g. print(cpformat(my_object)) ) successfully renders in color even when colorama's autoreset is enabled.