How to output my ruby commandline text in different colours

Question

How can I make the puts commands I output from a commandline based ruby program colour? I would appreciated any references to how I call each different colour also.

Lets

Answer 1

For a quick and dirty solution you can just embed ASCII colour codes in your strings (\e[XXm sets the colour to be used from now on to XX and \e[0m reset the colour to normal):

puts "The following word is blue.. \e[34mIm Blue!\e[0m"
puts "The following word is green.. \e[32mIm Green!\e[0m"
puts "The following word is red.. \e[31mIm Red!\e[0m"

ASCII codes also support things like underlining, blinking, and highlighting of text.

There also seems to be a helper library available that deals with the actual ASCII codes for you.

Edit: regarding the different platforms: you shouldn't have any trouble using ASCII codes on unix machines, but windows, AFAIK, doesn't support them out of the box. Fortunately there's a win32console gem that seems to fix this.

You can use the following snippet (found on the page Veger linked to) to load the win32console library only on windows:

begin
  require 'Win32/Console/ANSI' if PLATFORM =~ /win32/
rescue LoadError
  raise 'You must gem install win32console to use color on Windows'
end