Colorize expanded tabs

[qwweeeit]

Hi all,
from a string embedding tabs I want to colorize them when expanded:

# Starting from a string:
a= '1234\t5678\t\t 90\nqwerty\nasd fg'
# which embeds both tabs and lfs

# printing it you obtain:
print a
# 1234 5678 90
# qwerty
# asdfg

# print automatically expands tabs and interprets the NL.

# to colorize the expanded tabs, I tried:
print a.replace('\t', "\033[41m\t\033[0m") # 41 = red color
# instead it works (in Linux) for the \n (substituted with a red
space):
print a.replace('\n', "\033[41m \033[0m\n")

Can you help me?
Bye.

[Peter Otten]

qwweeeit wrote:

Hi all,
from a string embedding tabs I want to colorize them when expanded:

# Starting from a string:
a= '1234\t5678\t\t 90\nqwerty\nasd fg'
# which embeds both tabs and lfs

# printing it you obtain:
print a
# 1234 5678 90
# qwerty
# asdfg

# print automatically expands tabs and interprets the NL.

# to colorize the expanded tabs, I tried:
print a.replace('\t', "\033[41m\t\033[0m") # 41 = red color
# instead it works (in Linux) for the \n (substituted with a red
space):
print a.replace('\n', "\033[41m \033[0m\n")

Can you help me?
Bye.

If all else fails you can colorize the tabs after converting them to
spaces:

def splititer(text, token):
# A lazy iter(text.split (token)).
# Probably not worth the effort.
start = 0
while True:
try:
end = text.index(toke n, start)
except ValueError:
break
yield text[start:end]
start = end + len(token)
yield text[start:]

def colortabs(text, tabcolor, normcolor, tabwidth=8):
parts = splititer(text, "\t")
part = parts.next()
pos = len(part)
yield part
for part in parts:
width = tabwidth - pos % tabwidth
yield tabcolor
yield " " * width
yield normcolor
yield part
pos += width + len(part)

print "\t1234\t5678\t \t90".replace(" \t", "\033[41m\t\033[0m")
print "".join(colorta bs("\t1234\t567 8\t\t90", "\033[41m", "\033[0m"))

Peter

[qwweeeit]

Hi Peter,
thank you for your replay, but I was looking for a very
short routine. I even had in mind to use Linux & bash
(only one command line).
It seems that tab expansion, made by print, prevents
the working of the escape sequences for colors.
In fact, if you replace tab with a given number of spaces,
all works well.
That is :
print "\t1234\t5678\t \t90".replace(" \t", "\033[41m \033[0m")
correctly colorizes in red the spaces replacing the tabs...
Unfortunately this is not tab expansion!
Bye.