So, what is the ANSI Escape Code?
ANSI escape sequences are a standard, developed in the 70s, used to format outputs in computer
terminals. They are made of tags, making the console interpret what comes next as a command instead
of a simple string. Those codes are very useful and can make many things like: move the cursor, apply
bold or italic in text, clean the screen and change the background color. However, I will just talk about
the color codes in this article.
The first two digits of the tag are the ASCII value of ESC, (27, 1Bh, 33o) and “[“ (91, 5Bh, 133o), the
other part is an alphanumeric code representing some operation that will be applied in the output. We
have a stop tag too, which is the last part of the command, and its function, as the name suggests, is to
stop applying the modifications in the console.
256 colors
With 256 texts and background color options.
This code prints a table with 256 shades of text colors generated using ANSI escape code.
void print_256_colours_txt()
{
for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
if (i % 16 == 0 && i != 0)
cout << endl;
printf("\033[38;5;%dm %3d\033[m", i, i);
}
}
Codes of the 256 options of ANSI text colors
Background
This one generates all the options available with the 256 encodings.
Void print_256_colours_background()
{
for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
if (i % 16 == 0 && i != 0)
cout << endl;
printf("\033[48;5;%dm %3d\033[m", i, i);
}
}
Codes of the background colors available
If you look at the last pieces of code that I displayed, you will notice that they have a number at the
beginning of the code. The first one has a 38, this means that we are working with the text color. The
second one has a 48 and shows to the system that the code is referent of console’s background.
