Add Colors Library to CLI

[krowvin]

Proposal

Either use a custom implementation or a library for handling colors in the terminal.

While these seems like a feature that could be saved until the end, if we take the time to include it at the base level it will make a sharper output long run and less refactoring.

Thoughts

I'll go with Option 1 for now if we have no preference on this. Ideally bubble it up to all of cwms-cli for use by the child scripts. But if you think color is not needed for all I can just have it in critical data places using the Option 1 code here to keep it small!

Pros/Cons

Pros	Cons
Smaller size.	More work to implement cross platform support (possibly).
No requirement to follow an upstream library's major versions (easier to maintain).	Less features, we'd have to make them ourselves.
Custom Features are easy add. Lets us make something like a "counter" and color based on thresholds.	Library could stop being maintained...

Option 1 - Something Custom

I have this in my current cli code that uses ANSI Escape Codes for csv i'm bringing over:

terminal.py (click to view)

The code below is called like this:

 logger.info(
            f"Built timeseries {colorize(name, 'blue')} with {colorize_count(valid, total)} valid points."
        )
        logger.debug(
            f"Timeseries {name} data range: {colorize(datetime.fromtimestamp(start_epoch), 'blue')} to {colorize(datetime.fromtimestamp(end_epoch), 'blue')}"
        )

def colorize_count(valid: int, total: int) -> str:
    ''' Colorize the count based on the percentage of valid data.
    Args:
        valid (int): Number of valid data.
        total (int): Total number of data.
    Returns:
        str: ANSI Escape Code representing the colorized count status.
    '''
    percent = valid / total if total else 0

    if valid == 0:
        color = "red"
    elif percent >= 0.95:
        color = "green"
    else:
        color = "yellow"

    return f"{colorize(f'{valid}/{total}', color)}"

def colorize(text: str, color: str) -> str:
    ''' Colorize the text with ANSI Escape Codes provided a color
    Args:
        text (str): Text to colorize.
        color (str): Color to use.

    Returns:
        str: ANSI Escape Code representing the colorized count status.
    '''
    COLORS = {
        "red": "\033[91m",
        "green": "\033[92m",
        "yellow": "\033[93m",
        "blue": "\033[94m",
        "magenta": "\033[95m",
        "cyan": "\033[96m",
        "white": "\033[97m",
        "gray": "\033[90m",
        "reset": "\033[0m",
    }
    
    if color not in COLORS:
        return text

    return f"{COLORS.get(color.lower(), COLORS['reset'])}{text}{COLORS['reset']}"

Option 2 : Library

here's some libraries I found for this:

Library	Last PR	stars
colorama	last month	3700+
colored	last month	45
tcolorpy	8 months ago	11

Leaning towards colorama, which has code like this:

from colorama import init
init(autoreset=True)
print(Fore.RED + 'some red text')
print('automatically back to default color again')

[krowvin]

Example output of Option 1 currently with the csv script:

[krowvin]

Consideration, disable the color output when writing to a log file. Optionally add a flag to disable the color output

[DanielTOsborne]

Consideration, disable the color output when writing to a log file. Optionally add a flag to disable the color output

I like this idea, and support an option to disable color regardless of redirection. You could have a misconfigured terminal which can't handle the codes correctly, for example.