Perl Cookbook

Changing Text Color

Problem

You want text to appear in different colors on the screen. For instance, you want to emphasize a mode line or highlight an error message.

Solution

Use the CPAN module Term::ANSIColor to send the ANSI color-change sequences to the user’s terminal:

use Term::ANSIColor;

print color("red"), "Danger, Will Robinson!\n", color("reset");
print "This is just normal text.\n";
print colored("<BLINK>Do you hurt yet?</BLINK>", "blink");

Or, you can use convenience functions from Term::ANSIColor:

use Term::ANSIColor qw(:constants);

print RED, "Danger, Will Robinson!\n", RESET;

Discussion

Term::ANSIColor prepares escape sequences that some (but far from all) terminals will recognize. For example, if you normally launch a color-xterm, this recipe will work. If you normally use the normal xterm program, or have a vt100 in your kitchen, it won’t.

There are two ways of using the module: either by calling the exported functions color($attribute) and colored($text, $attribute), or by using convenience functions like BOLD, BLUE, and RESET.

Attributes can be a combination of colors and controls. The colors are black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, on_block, on_red, on_green, on_yellow, on_blue, on_magenta, on_cyan, and on_white. (Apparently orange and purple don’t matter.) The controls are clear, reset, bold, underline, underscore, blink, reverse, and concealed. Clear and reset are synonyms, as are underline and underscore. Reset restores the colors to the way they were ...