Another Command Window text color hack

Matlab’s Command Window text is notorious for its boring black & white appearance when sending output via the built-in fprintf or disp commands. Back in 2009, I explained the undocumented ability to display red or hyperlinked text using fprintf, or colored and underlined text using my cprintf utility. I followed this up last year with the relatively new ability to display bold text formatting, using either fprintf or cprintf.

A short while ago, Carsten Allefeld (a regular on this blog) alerted me to the fact that recent Matlab releases have added yet another undocumented feature, this time the ability to specify orange formatting to the output text. This made sense: after all, recent releases have started to display warnings as orange text on STDOUT. While errors have for ages been rendered red by the simple act of directing their output to STDERR, warnings are output to STDOUT and so a bypass was naturally devised. This is similar to the <strong> bypass that I explained last year, for the bold formatting. By redirecting STDOUT, Carsten was able to see that by adding '[\b...]\b' to the output text, anything between the brackets was given an orange color. Of course, we can still use cprintf to display any color in the rainbow, orange included:

Orange color in Command Window text

The \b hack relies on the fact that \b is actually the standard back-space control-character, which erases the preceding [ (bracket) character. Matlab's implementation of fprintf simply has a back-door that switches to orange color when it sees a couple of these [\b. By the way, it won't work if you use any other combination, or if there are not exactly two such in the displayed text. MathWorks made the hack very specific so that it would be close to impossible to come by it by mistake.

<editorial>
If you ask me, this is an example of bad design: instead of modifying fprintf to enable generic color and text formatting, the developer hard-coded a specific [\b hack for a specific color, and a different specific <strong> hack for bold formatting. If tomorrow a green color or underlined text will be needed, they'll need to modify the hard-coding and extend it with yet new hard-coding. Moreover, the [\b hack does not enable multiple segments of orange colors in the same text, a natural extension. In their shoes, I'd probably have extended the <strong> paradigm with something like <font color="orange"> or: <span style="color:#FF8000;"> (I wonder where I got this idea from? hmm...) Maybe I'm just being too harsh: it's obviously easier to bitch from the benches than to score at the field...
</editorial>

Anyway, if you only need black, red and orange colors in your text, you need look no further than fprintf. If, however, you require your outputs to be a bit more lively, then consider using cprintf:

cpintf demo

Do you know of any additional undocumented Command Window hack? If so, please do leave a comment below.

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3. Command Window text manipulation Special control characters can be used to format text output in Matlab's Command Window. ...
4. Changing Matlab’s Command Window colors – part 2 The Matlab Command Window enables a limited degree of inline color customization - this post describes how to use it...