Generating Output¶
A standard cmd
application can produce output by using either of these
methods:
print("Greetings, Professor Falken.", file=self.stdout)
self.stdout.write("Shall we play a game?\n")
While you could send output directly to sys.stdout
, cmd2.Cmd
can be initialized with a stdin
and stdout
variables, which it stores
as self.stdin
and self.stdout
. By using these variables every time you
produce output, you can trivially change where all the output goes by changing
how you initialize your class.
cmd2.Cmd
extends this approach in a number of convenient ways. See
Output Redirection and Pipes for information on how
users can change where the output of a command is sent. In order for those
features to work, the output you generate must be sent to self.stdout
. You
can use the methods described above, and everything will work fine.
cmd2.Cmd
also includes a number of output related methods which you
may use to enhance the output your application produces.
Ordinary Output¶
The poutput()
method is similar to the Python
built-in print function. poutput()
adds two
conveniences:
1. Since users can pipe output to a shell command, it catches
BrokenPipeError
and outputs the contents ofself.broken_pipe_warning
tostderr
.self.broken_pipe_warning
defaults to an empty string so this method will just swallow the exception. If you want to show an error message, put it inself.broken_pipe_warning
when you initializeCmd
.2. It examines and honors the allow_style setting. See Colored Output below for more details.
Here’s a simple command that shows this method in action:
def do_echo(self, args):
"""A simple command showing how poutput() works"""
self.poutput(args)
Error Messages¶
When an error occurs in your program, you can display it on sys.stderr
by
calling the perror()
method. By default this method applies
cmd2.ansi.style_error()
to the output.
Warning Messages¶
pwarning()
is just like perror()
but applies
cmd2.ansi.style_warning()
to the output.
Feedback¶
You may have the need to display information to the user which is not intended
to be part of the generated output. This could be debugging information or
status information about the progress of long running commands. It’s not
output, it’s not error messages, it’s feedback. If you use the
timing setting, the output of how long it took the
command to run will be output as feedback. You can use the
pfeedback()
method to produce this type of output, and
several Settings control how it is handled.
If the quiet setting is True
, then calling
pfeedback()
produces no output. If
quiet is False
, the
feedback_to_output setting is consulted to determine
whether to send the output to stdout
or stderr
.
Exceptions¶
If your app catches an exception and you would like to display the exception to
the user, the pexcept()
method can help. The default behavior
is to just display the message contained within the exception. However, if the
debug setting is True
, then the entire stack trace
will be displayed.
Paging Output¶
If you know you are going to generate a lot of output, you may want to display
it in a way that the user can scroll forwards and backwards through it. If you
pass all of the output to be displayed in a single call to
ppaged()
, it will be piped to an operating system appropriate
shell command to page the output. On Windows, the output is piped to more
;
on Unix-like operating systems like MacOS and Linux, it is piped to less
.
Colored Output¶
You can add your own ANSI escape sequences to your output which
tell the terminal to change the foreground and background colors. If you want
to give yourself a headache, you can generate these by hand. You could also use
a Python color library like plumbum.colors, colored, or colorama. Colorama is unique because when it’s
running on Windows, it wraps stdout
, looks for ANSI escape sequences, and
converts them into the appropriate win32
calls to modify the state of the
terminal.
cmd2
imports and uses Colorama and provides a number of convenience methods
for generating colorized output, measuring the screen width of colorized
output, setting the window title in the terminal, and removing ANSI text style
escape codes from a string. These functions are all documentated in
cmd2.ansi
.
After adding the desired escape sequences to your output, you should use one of these methods to present the output to the user:
cmd2.Cmd.poutput()
cmd2.Cmd.perror()
cmd2.Cmd.pwarning()
cmd2.Cmd.pexcept()
cmd2.Cmd.pfeedback()
cmd2.Cmd.ppaged()
These methods all honor the allow_style setting, which users can modify to control whether these escape codes are passed through to the terminal or not.
Aligning Text¶
If you would like to generate output which is left, center, or right aligned within a specified width or the terminal width, the following functions can help:
These functions differ from Python’s string justifying functions in that they support characters with display widths greater than 1. Additionally, ANSI style sequences are safely ignored and do not count toward the display width. This means colored text is supported. If text has line breaks, then each line is aligned independently.
Columnar Output¶
When generating output in multiple columns, you often need to calculate the width of each item so you can pad it appropriately with spaces. However, there are categories of Unicode characters that occupy 2 cells, and other that occupy 0. To further complicate matters, you might have included ANSI escape sequences in the output to generate colors on the terminal.
The cmd2.ansi.style_aware_wcswidth()
function solves both of these
problems. Pass it a string, and regardless of which Unicode characters and ANSI
text style escape sequences it contains, it will tell you how many characters
on the screen that string will consume when printed.