Display colored ascii art in terminal using Python curses

Question

I want to display a colored ascii art in a terminal (for e.g. windows cmd) using python-curses. I wrote something really basic like this :

import time
import curses
stdscr = curses.initscr()

curses.noecho()
curses.cbreak()
stdscr.keypad(True)

f = open('betterdays.ansi.txt',"r",encoding="utf8")
asciiart = f.read()
for y, line in enumerate(asciiart.splitlines(), 2):
    stdscr.addstr(y, 2, line)


stdscr.refresh()
time.sleep(5)

curses.echo()
curses.nocbreak()
stdscr.keypad(False)

curses.endwin()

whihc gives me the error:

 stdscr.addstr(y, 2, line)
_curses.error: addwstr() returned ERR

I already looked at this question, but it doesn't solve my problem. Is there a better way to accomplish this? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

The .txt file can be seen/downloaded here.

BTW, none of what I put in my answer quite explains your error message. What version of Python are you using, on what OS? — William McBrine, Oct 29 '20 at 12:14
Does this answer your question? [How to display pre-colored string with curses?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30189434/how-to-display-pre-colored-string-with-curses) — Thomas Dickey, Oct 29 '20 at 18:36

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 29 '20 at 12:11

This isn’t “colored ASCII” — back in the day, we called it ANSI art. Curses doesn’t interpret the ANSI escape sequences that generate color and motion, nor does it pass them through cleanly to the terminal, even though it may (usually does, but it depends on the terminal) use them itself to render its output.

There are two basic approaches you can take: If you’re working within a broader curses framework and really want those features, you can interpret the ANSI sequences yourself, and render them in curses structures.

More simply, if you just want to put that image on the screen, and if you know that your terminal already supports ANSI, then skip curses, and just print each line via standard output.

Display colored ascii art in terminal using Python curses

1 Answers1