Colorama not working with Tabulate to display colored output in Python

Question

I am attempting to create a colorful table in Python using the tabulate and colorama libraries. However, despite having both libraries installed and confirmed that colorama works fine with other programs, the output is not colored as expected.

Here's the code I'm using:

from tabulate import tabulate
import colorama
from colorama import Fore, Style

# Initialize colorama to work on Windows
colorama.init(autoreset=True)

# Sample data for the table
data = [
    ["Name", "Age", "Country"],
    ["John", 30, "USA"],
    ["Alice", 25, "Canada"],
    ["Bob", 22, "UK"],
]

# Table headers and data, aligned center and colored
table = tabulate(data, headers="firstrow", tablefmt="grid")
colored_table = f"{Fore.CYAN}{Style.BRIGHT}{table}{Style.RESET_ALL}"

print(colored_table)

However, the output of this code is:

As you can see, the table is displayed, but the colors are not applied. I have double-checked that the colorama library is functioning correctly with other programs, so the issue seems to be specific to this code.

Can someone kindly identify the potential cause of this problem or provide any solutions to get the colorama library to work in conjunction with tabulate for displaying colored output in the table?

Answer 1

It looks like I've encountered an issue with using the colorama library in conjunction with the tabulate library to display colored output. The behavior I've observing might be due to the interaction between tabulate and colorama. While colorama works by modifying the standard output stream, it might not integrate seamlessly with the way tabulate generates tables.

However, there's a workaround that I have used to achieve colored output in your table by leveraging the simple_colors library. This library provides a way to apply colors to strings, which can be useful when working with tabulated data.

Here's how I've modified my code to use the simple_colors library and achieve colored table output:

from tabulate import tabulate
from simple_colors import *

# Sample data for the table
data = [
    ["Name", "Age", "Country"],
    ["John", 30, "USA"],
    ["Alice", 25, "Canada"],
    ["Bob", 22, "UK"],
]

# Table headers and data, aligned center and colored
table = tabulate(data, headers="firstrow", tablefmt="grid")

# Apply colors using simple_colors
colored_table = green(table)  # You can use other color functions like red(), blue(), etc.

print(colored_table)

In this code, we import the simple_colors library and use its color functions (such as green(), red(), etc.) to apply colors to the table output. we can customize the colors based on our preferences.

It's worth noting that this solution is a workaround, and future releases of tabulate or colorama might improve compatibility. However, for the current situation, the simple_colors library provides a reliable way to achieve my desired colored table output.