Thread: Simple method of coloured text?

Well, I hate to break it to you, but those are the two easiest ways of doing the colors. windows method is fairly easy:

SetConsoleTextAttribute(HANDLE handle, WORD color);

Parameter 1: HANDLE handle -
This is a HANDLE to the window's output buffer (that does sound confusing, doesn't it?). To make this simple, make a global variable like so:

Code:

HANDLE stdOut = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);

Now you've got the handle to the output so you can manipulate the text.

Parameter 2:
This parameter is the foreground/background color of the text. The colors are as follows:

Code:

FOREGROUND_RED // A dark red for the text
FOREGROUND_GREEN // A dark green
FOREGROUND_BLUE // A dark blue
FOREGROUND_INTENSITY // Makes the text colors brighter (so dark red would become red)
BACKGROUND_RED // A dark red for the text background
BACKGROUND_GREEN
BACKGROUND_BLUE
BACKGROUND_INTENSITY // Brightens the text background color

Those are very basic colors. You can combine them to make more. Like, if you wanted yellow text on a blue background, here would be the code:

Code:

SetConsoleTextAttribute(stdOut, FOREGROUND_RED | FOREGROUND_GREEN | FOREGROUND_INTENSITY | BACKGROUND_BLUE | BACKGROUND_INTENSITY);

Finally, here's my last example:

Code:

#include <iostream.h>
#include <windows.h>

// The HANDLE
HANDLE stdOut = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);

int main()
{
     // Make red text
     SetConsoleTextAttribute(stdOut, FOREGROUND_RED | FOREGROUND_INTENSITY);
     cout << "Red text!\n";
     return 0;
}

I hope that helps a little. Just ask if you need clarification.

Brendan