python in Visual Studio Code - how to print funky stuff

Question

I have been testing printing colors and characters in VS Code (version 1.69) using python 3.+. To print colored text in VS code you would use:

print("\033[31mThis is red font.\033[0m")
print("\033[32mThis is green font.\033[0m")
print("\033[33mThis is yellow font.\033[0m")
print("\033[34mThis is blue font.\033[0m")
print("\033[37mThis is the default font. \033[0m")

Special characters would be like the following:

print("\1\2\3\4\05\06\07\016\017\013\014\020")
print("\21\22\23\24\25\26\27\36\37\31\32\34\35")

Part 1 of my question: How would you print special characters from a loop? What I tried is:

for i in range(1, 99):
     t = "\\" + str(i)
     print(t)

Part 2: Is there a way to print dark text with a colored highlighted background?

Does this answer your question? [Convert int to ASCII and back in Python](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3673428/convert-int-to-ascii-and-back-in-python) — Sneftel, Jul 13 '22 at 22:41

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 13 '22 at 23:07

The first example is showing ansi escape sequences, the second example is using a common convention in many languages, including Python, to include non-standard characters in a string by escaping their character value, but in your example, you may not be realising that you're escaping octal values, instead of decimal ones.

Printing them is no different from printing any character though - I think you may be confusing printing strings representing values and the actual values of variables, a very common mistake/confusion for beginning programmers. If you want to be able to print ('\21') without writing out the string, you could just print(chr(17)), because 17 is the decimal equivalent of octal 21.

Have a look at the documentation for string literals for more detail.

The loop you're trying to create would be something like:

for i in range(1, 99):
    print(chr(i))

But you have to keep in mind that if i gets to 21, it's not printing '\21', but '\25' since 25 is the octal representation of the decimal value 21.

Note: also, you're asking specifically about VSCode, but that's a different question altogether. Whether or not the console in VSCode supports printing ANSI escape sequences depends on the type of terminal, it doesn't really have that much to do with what you do in your code. However, if you want ANSI escape sequences to render in text files, there's extensions for that.

python in Visual Studio Code - how to print funky stuff

1 Answers1