Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

What are people's thoughts on adding acolor: bool arg todifflib.unified_diff so that it injects ANSI terminal codes to color things in the way thatgit diff would?

New API:

difflib.unified_diff(a,b,fromfile='',tofile='',fromfiledate='',tofiledate='',n=3,lineterm='\n',color=False)

Open questions:

1. Should the colors be configurable? Eg via dictcolors={"equal": "\033[31;1;4m", "delete": "...", "insert": "...", "header": "...", "hunk": "..."}
   • The default would be the basic 4bit colors used bygit diff.:
     • header: bold\033[1m
     • hunk lines: cyan\033[36m
     • removed: red\033[31m
     • added: green\033[32m
     • equal: no formatting
   • This might be useful for nonstandard terminal colors?
2. Should this be added to other functions likendiff andcontextdiff?

I'd be happy to tackle this. Excluding tests, it looks to be O(20 LOC) changes.

$ cat python mydiff.py cat: python: No such file or directoryimport difflibimport pathlibfile1 = pathlib.Path("a.txt")file2 = pathlib.Path("b.txt")udiff = difflib.unified_diff(    file1.read_text().splitlines(),    file2.read_text().splitlines(),    fromfile=str(file1),    tofile=str(file2),)for line in udiff:    print(line)$ python mydiff.py --- a.txt+++ b.txt@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@ 1a-2b 3c+4d

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-133722: Add Difflib theme to_colorize and 'color' option todifflib.unified_diff #133725