Best Ansi Escape beginning

Question

Which Ansi escape sequence is the most portable and/or simply best and why?

1. "\u001B[32;1mThis is bright green\u001B[0m"
2. "\x1B[33;1mThis is bright yellow\x1B[0m"
3. "\e[35;4;1mThis is bright purple underlined\e[0m"

I have been using printf "\x1B[32;1mgreen\x1B[0m" (that's an example in unix bash script for example) out of habit, but I was wondering if there were any reasons to use one over the other. Is one more portable than the others? That would be my assumption.

Also, if you know of any other Ansi Escape sequence feel free to share it in the comments or at the end of your answer.

If you don't know what an Ansi Escape sequence is or want to become more familiar with it, then here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

NOTE:

All of the escape sequences above have worked on all of the Unix systems I have been on, however one must still rely on the system itself to interpret the escape codes. Windows, for example, does not permit any sort of escape codes except four (BEL, L-F or linefeed, C-R or carriage return and, of course, BS or backspace), so Ansi escape sequences will not work.

Answer 1

Short answer: It depends on the host string parser.

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Long answer:

It depends on the string parser; that is, the piece of code that actually takes in your string ("\x1b[1mSome string\x1b[0m") as a literal and parses the escape characters using the backslash ANSI escape sequence.

• For parsers that support hexadecimal escapes (\x), then \x1b (character 0x1B) should work.
• For parsers that support octal escapes (\ddd), then \033 (octal 33) should work.
• For parsers that support unicode escapes (\u), then \u001B should work.

Quick elaboration: \x and \u are similar; \x usually refers to a single character, 0-255, in hexadecimal radix. \u means the same (as it is represented in hexadecimal), but supports two bytes (in most parsers) and generally refers to 16-bit unicode characters.

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A lesser used/supported escape character, as you mentioned, is \e. This escape is most commonly used with parsers/languages that expect a lot of ANSI escaping to happen, such as bash (and most other shells).

For instance, Node.js does not support \e:

> console.log("\x1b[31mhello\x1b[0m")
hello
undefined
> console.log("\e[31mhello\e[0m")
e[31mhelloe[0m
undefined

Neither does Lua:

> print('\x1b[31mhello\x1b[0m')
hello
> print('\e[31mhello\e[0m')
stdin:1: invalid escape sequence near '\e'

Or even Python:

>>> print("\x1b[31mhello\x1b[0m")
hello
>>> print("\e[31mhello\e[0m")
\e[31mhello\e[0m
>>>

Though PHP does:

<?php
echo "\x1b[31mhello\x1b[0m\n"; // hello
echo "\e[31mhello\e[0m\n"; // hello