libcolor

A static C library to output colored text to the console.

Why ?

Output colored text to the console is quite easy. Before the text, you have to print "special characters" to set the colors and style (font color, background color, bold text).

However, the color characters are not easy to handle, and makes your printf look horrible. libcolor provides all color characters and a printf-like function to output colored text without going crazy.

Have a look at the following example :

#include <stdio.h>

#include "color.h" // from libcolor

int main(void) {
  // The last color characters (\e[m or COLOR_NORMAL from libcolor) is used to reset the colors at the end of the printf.
  // If you don't reset the colors, the colors will be applied to the following printf ("normal text" printf in this example).
  printf("\e[31m\e[47m\e[1mThis is bold red text on white -- no libcolor\e[m\n");
  printf("normal text\n");
  printf(COLOR_RED COLOR_BG_WHITE COLOR_BOLD "This is bold red text on white -- using libcolor values\n" COLOR_NORMAL);
  printf("normal text\n");
  cprintf(RED, WHITE, BOLD, "This is bold red text on white -- using libcolor cprintf()\n");
  printf("normal text\n");
  return 0;
}

and the output :

How to build

Use the makefile to build the lib (bin/libcolor.a):

make # Build the lib and the samples
make clean # Clean the temporary and objects file.

If you want to remove the lib and all the temporary files:

make distclean

How to use

Available colors :

• Black
• Red
• Green
• Yellow
• Blue
• Magenta
• Cyan
• White

See the Wikipedia article about ANSI espace colors code for more information.

libcolor provides the function cfprintf which can be used as fprintf(3), but there are more parameters :

• The font color (NORMAL, BLACK... See the enumeration color_t)
• The background color (NORMAL, BLACK... See the enumeration color_t)
• Write bold text (BOLD or NOBOLD)

libcolor provides another function (cprintf) which is equivalent to cfprintf with stdout as stream.

int cfprintf(FILE* stream, color_t fontcolor, color_t bgcolor, int bold, const char* format, ...);
int cprintf(color_t fontcolor, color_t bgcolor, int bold, const char* format, ...);

Tools

• Written with Emacs 24
• Built with gcc 4.8
• Tested on GNU/Linux (Linux Mint 16)