Support for rich colored cell data

[smprather]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I would like to have red/green colored PASS and FAIL elements in my table. I would like to use https://github.com/Textualize/rich markup. The coloring is working, but the column width detection is not filtering out terminal codes.

from rich import print as rprint
table = prettytable.PrettyTable(field_names=("Lib", "APL Type", "P/F"))

for lib in sorted(libs_to_publish):
    for apl_type in sorted(cfg.apl_types):
        success = Path(work_dir / lib / apl_type / "DONE").exists()
        table.add_row([lib, apl_type, "[green]PASS[white]" if success else "[red]FAIL[white]"])

rprint("[white]" + table.get_string())

Describe alternatives you've considered

I tried using a ColorTable thinking maybe you had term-control filtering (for width calculation) enabled in there. But that didn't work with rich.print. I got all kinds of term codes just printed to my terminal as if they weren't prefixed with the [ESC] character.

Thanks!

[hugovk]

What's happening here, is you're passing things like "[green]PASS[white]" to PrettyTable, which are just strings. It's doing the width calculation based on that 18-char string.

Then you're fetching the rendered string representation of the whole table, and passing that to Rich.

Rich then converts the Rich-specific [x] codes into ANSI codes for printing, so "[green]PASS[white]" turns into a string with four visible characters, and ANSI codes on either side.

Some options:

• If using Rich colour codes, then also use Rich tables: https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tables.html
• Apply colour to the text before inserting it into the table. For example, with termcolor: https://github.com/jazzband/prettytable/issues/196#issuecomment-1240364535
• If you can get Rich to "render" "[green]PASS[white]" into a string with ANSI colour codes, then you could try inserting those into the table too

[smprather]

I did some experimenting. I think rich.table.Table is the way to go. Thanks!