wasabi: A lightweight console printing and formatting toolkit

Over the years, I've written countless implementations of coloring and formatting utilities to output messages in our libraries like spaCy, Thinc and Prodigy. While there are many other great open-source options, I've always ended up wanting something slightly different or slightly custom.

This package is still a work in progress and aims to bundle those utilities in a standardised way so they can be shared across our other projects. It's super lightweight, has zero dependencies and works with Python 3.6+.

💬 FAQ

Are you going to add more features?

Yes, there's still a few of helpers and features to port over. However, the new features will be heavily biased by what we (think we) need. I always appreciate pull requests to improve the existing functionality – but I want to keep this library as simple, lightweight and specific as possible.

Can I use this for my projects?

Sure, if you like it, feel free to adopt it! Just keep in mind that the package is very specific and not intended to be a full-featured and fully customisable formatting library. If that's what you're looking for, you might want to try other packages – for example, colored, crayons, colorful, tabulate, console or py-term, to name a few.

Why wasabi?

I was looking for a short and descriptive name, but everything was already taken. So I ended up naming this package after one of my rats, Wasabi. 🐀

⌛️ Installation

pip install wasabi

🎛 API

function msg

An instance of Printer, initialized with the default config. Useful as a quick shortcut if you don't need to customize initialization.

from wasabi import msg

msg.good("Success!")

class Printer

method Printer.__init__

from wasabi import Printer

msg = Printer()

method Printer.text

msg = Printer()
msg.text("Hello world!")

method Printer.good, Printer.fail, Printer.warn, Printer.info

Print special formatted messages.

msg = Printer()
msg.good("Success")
msg.fail("Error")
msg.warn("Warning")
msg.info("Info")

method Printer.divider

Print a formatted divider.

msg = Printer()
msg.divider("Heading")

contextmanager Printer.loading

msg = Printer()
with msg.loading("Loading..."):
    # Do something here that takes longer
    time.sleep(10)
msg.good("Successfully loaded something!")

method Printer.table, Printer.row

See Tables.

property Printer.counts

Get the counts of how often the special printers were fired, e.g. MESSAGES.GOOD. Can be used to print an overview like "X warnings"

msg = Printer()
msg.good("Success")
msg.fail("Error")
msg.warn("Error")

print(msg.counts)
# Counter({'good': 1, 'fail': 2, 'warn': 0, 'info': 0})

Tables

function table

Lightweight helper to format tabular data.

from wasabi import table

data = [("a1", "a2", "a3"), ("b1", "b2", "b3")]
header = ("Column 1", "Column 2", "Column 3")
widths = (8, 9, 10)
aligns = ("r", "c", "l")
formatted = table(data, header=header, divider=True, widths=widths, aligns=aligns)

Column 1   Column 2    Column 3
--------   ---------   ----------
      a1      a2       a3
      b1      b2       b3

function row

from wasabi import row

data = ("a1", "a2", "a3")
formatted = row(data)

a1   a2   a3

class TracebackPrinter

Helper to output custom formatted tracebacks and error messages. Currently used in Thinc.

method TracebackPrinter.__init__

Initialize a traceback printer.

from wasabi import TracebackPrinter

tb = TracebackPrinter(tb_base="thinc", tb_exclude=("check.py",))

method TracebackPrinter.__call__

Output custom formatted tracebacks and errors.

from wasabi import TracebackPrinter
import traceback

tb = TracebackPrinter(tb_base="thinc", tb_exclude=("check.py",))

error = tb("Some error", "Error description", highlight="kwargs", tb=traceback.extract_stack())
raise ValueError(error)

  Some error
  Some error description

  Traceback:
  ├─ <lambda> [61] in .env/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pluggy/manager.py
  ├─── _multicall [187] in .env/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pluggy/callers.py
  └───── pytest_fixture_setup [969] in .env/lib/python3.6/site-packages/_pytest/fixtures.py
         >>> result = call_fixture_func(fixturefunc, request, kwargs)

class MarkdownRenderer

Helper to create Markdown-formatted content. Will store the blocks added to the Markdown document in order.

from wasabi import MarkdownRenderer

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add(md.title(1, "Hello world"))
md.add("This is a paragraph")
print(md.text)

method MarkdownRenderer.__init__

Initialize a Markdown renderer.

from wasabi import MarkdownRenderer

md = MarkdownRenderer()

method MarkdownRenderer.add

Add a block to the Markdown document.

from wasabi import MarkdownRenderer

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add("This is a paragraph")

property MarkdownRenderer.text

The rendered Markdown document.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add("This is a paragraph")
print(md.text)

method MarkdownRenderer.table

Create a Markdown-formatted table.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
table = md.table([("a", "b"), ("c", "d")], ["Column 1", "Column 2"])
md.add(table)

| Column 1 | Column 2 |
| --- | --- |
| a | b |
| c | d |

method MarkdownRenderer.title

Create a Markdown-formatted heading.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add(md.title(1, "Hello world"))
md.add(md.title(2, "Subheading", "💖"))

# Hello world

## 💖 Subheading

method MarkdownRenderer.list

Create a Markdown-formatted non-nested list.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add(md.list(["item", "other item"]))
md.add(md.list(["first item", "second item"], numbered=True))

- item
- other item

1. first item
2. second item

method MarkdownRenderer.link

Create a Markdown-formatted link.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add(md.link("Google", "https://google.com"))

[Google](https://google.com)

method MarkdownRenderer.code_block

Create a Markdown-formatted code block.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add(md.code_block("import spacy", "python"))

```python
import spacy
```

method MarkdownRenderer.code, MarkdownRenderer.bold, MarkdownRenderer.italic

Create a Markdown-formatted text.

md = MarkdownRenderer()
md.add(md.code("import spacy"))
md.add(md.bold("Hello!"))
md.add(md.italic("Emphasis"))

`import spacy`

**Hello!**

_Emphasis_

Utilities

function color

from wasabi import color

formatted = color("This is a text", fg="white", bg="green", bold=True)

function wrap

from wasabi import wrap

wrapped = wrap("Hello world, this is a text.", indent=2)

function diff_strings

from wasabi import diff_strings

diff = diff_strings("hello world!", "helloo world")

Environment variables

Wasabi also respects the following environment variables. The prefix can be customised on the Printer via the env_prefix argument. For example, setting env_prefix="SPACY" will expect the environment variable SPACY_LOG_FRIENDLY.

🔔 Run tests

Fork or clone the repo, make sure you have pytest installed and then run it on the package directory. The tests are located in /wasabi/tests.

pip install pytest
cd wasabi
python -m pytest wasabi