1 Introduction

We often use print statements to get feedback on certain process steps or to present findigs. In this post, I want to show how to use print statements cleverly and make them more descriptive.

2 Loading the libraries and classes

import pandas as pd
import os

class Color:
   PURPLE = '\033[95m'
   CYAN = '\033[96m'
   DARKCYAN = '\033[36m'
   BLUE = '\033[94m'
   GREEN = '\033[92m'
   YELLOW = '\033[93m'
   RED = '\033[91m'
   BOLD = '\033[1m'
   UNDERLINE = '\033[4m'
   END = '\033[0m'

3 Modified Print Statements

3.1 Print Statements with Variables

As we all know for sure, beyond the simple text output like

print('My Text')

you can also print the contents of variables.

3.1.1 String Variables

This is still relatively easy and requires no modification:

today = pd.to_datetime('today').strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

print('Current Date: ' + today)

3.1.2 Nummeric Variables

Numeric variables cannot be used quite so easily in the print statement. We have to format them as string first.

my_calculation = 10 + 5 

print('My Calculation: ' + str(my_calculation))

3.2 Print Statements with compound Paths

Here we request the current working directory we are on:

root_directory = os.getcwd()
root_directory

Now we connect this to our destination folder:

new_path = root_directory + '\\' + 'Target_Folder'
print(new_path)

Even simpler, this is how it works:

new_path = os.path.join(root_directory, 'Target_Folder')
print(new_path)

3.3 Color Print Statements

To make print statements even more beautiful, we can have parts printed in color or bold. For this we use the Color-class created above.

print('Current Date: ' + Color.RED + today)

print(Color.BLUE + 'Current Date: ' + 
      Color.BOLD + Color.RED + today)

print(Color.RED + 'My ' 
      + Color.END + 
      'Calculation: ' + str(my_calculation))

print(Color.BLUE + 'My ' + Color.END + 
      Color.UNDERLINE + Color.GREEN + 'Calculation:' + Color.END +
      ' ' + Color.BOLD + Color.RED + str(my_calculation))

3.4 Print Statements with if else

num_list = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
threshold = 5

for i in num_list:
    if i < threshold:
        print(Color.GREEN + Color.BOLD + 'Below Threshold ' + str([i]))
    else:
        print(Color.RED + Color.BOLD + 'Above Threshold ' + str([i]))

4 Conclusion

In this short post I showed how to modify Print Statements and have them output in color.