6 Comments

1. Scriptster / July 21, 2010

   Thank you for the tip! I admit it never occurred to me to color command line output but you got me thinking now! Many times you have to stare at multi-line outputs of some long running scripts and it’s oh so easy to miss an important line with some sort of an error or warning message in it. It would stand out so much more if it’s, say, red or black on yellow background. I think I’m going to give it a try now.
   Thanks!

   Reply
2. David Ayvazyan / October 27, 2010

   BEST JOB !!!! Great thanks !!!!

   Reply
3. Ben Harris / June 7, 2011

   Thanks for this. Like @Scriptster, I’m going to use it for important debug messages/output. I’ve re-written it a bit to shorten the syntax, so to make the text red for example, I use

   $c = new Colors();
   $c->red(“I’m red”);
   $c->green(“I’m green”);

   Cheers,

   Ben

   Reply
4. Jesse Donat / October 26, 2011

   I found your version a little over complicated so I simplified it and saved it as a Github Gist here – https://gist.github.com/1315354

   There was no real need to require an instance as there are no local members being modified – so its purposely suited to just being accessed from the static state.

   Reply
   • JR / October 26, 2011

     Hi Jesse,

     I checked your static function and idea is nice, but it lacks a few things.

     1. It’s working only with PHP >= 5.3.0
     2. It throws a PHP Notice if background color is not set
     3. You have to call some totally random static method if you don’t want any foreground color

     Static and much more compatible with earlier PHP versions example could be following:

     <?php
      
          	class ColorCLI {
                     static $foreground_colors = array(
                             'black'        => '0;30', 'dark_gray'    => '1;30',
                             'blue'         => '0;34', 'light_blue'   => '1;34',
                             'green'        => '0;32', 'light_green'  => '1;32',
                             'cyan'         => '0;36', 'light_cyan'   => '1;36',
                             'red'          => '0;31', 'light_red'    => '1;31',
                             'purple'       => '0;35', 'light_purple' => '1;35',
                             'brown'        => '0;33', 'yellow'	 => '1;33',
                             'light_gray'   => '0;37', 'white'        => '1;37',
                     );
      
                     static $background_colors = array(
                             'black'        => '40', 'red'          => '41',
                             'green'        => '42', 'yellow'       => '43',
                             'blue'         => '44', 'magenta'      => '45',
                             'cyan'         => '46', 'light_gray'   => '47',
                     );
      
                     // Returns colored string
                     public static function getColoredString($string, $foreground_color = null, $background_color = null) {
                             $colored_string = "";
      
                             // Check if given foreground color found
                             if ( isset(self::$foreground_colors[$foreground_color]) ) {
                                     $colored_string .= "\033[" . self::$foreground_colors[$foreground_color] . "m";
                             }
                             // Check if given background color found
                             if ( isset(self::$background_colors[$background_color]) ) {
                                     $colored_string .= "\033[" . self::$background_colors[$background_color] . "m";
                             }
      
                             // Add string and end coloring
                             $colored_string .=  $string . "\033[0m";
      
                             return $colored_string;
                     }
      
                     // Returns all foreground color names
                     public static function getForegroundColors() {
                             return array_keys(self::$foreground_colors);
                     }
      
                     // Returns all background color names
                     public static function getBackgroundColors() {
                             return array_keys(self::$background_colors);
                     }
             }

     Example usage:

     echo ColorCLI::getColoredString('Test');
     echo ColorCLI::getColoredString('Test', 'blue');
     echo ColorCLI::getColoredString('Test', null, 'blue');
      
     print_r(ColorCLI::getForegroundColors());
     print_r(ColorCLI::getBackgroundColors());

     Reply
     • Jesse Donat / May 17, 2012

       I never saw your reply and accidentally stumbled on this googling what else was out there just now :-)

       If you recheck the gist here – https://gist.github.com/1315354
       I’ve since fixed many of the complaints, added blink, underline, normal and some other things. It still uses __callStatic, but seriously, 5.4 is out, there’s no excuse to still be on 5.2. The bell function doesn’t belong honestly, but I’m working on a more generic general terminal control class, which I’ve used to implement for instance progress bars and other cool stuff, its not done yet though so I haven’t published it yet as some of the code is admittedly wonky.

       Reply