Console Markup

Rich supports a simple markup which you can use to insert color and styles virtually everywhere Rich would accept a string (e.g. print() and log()).

Run the following command to see some examples:

python -m rich.markup

Syntax

Console markup uses a syntax inspired by bbcode. If you write the style (see Styles) in square brackets, e.g. [bold red], that style will apply until it is closed with a corresponding [/bold red].

Here’s a simple example:

from rich import print
print("[bold red]alert![/bold red] Something happened")

If you don’t close a style, it will apply until the end of the string. Which is sometimes convenient if you want to style a single line. For example:

print("[bold italic yellow on red blink]This text is impossible to read")

There is a shorthand for closing a style. If you omit the style name from the closing tag, Rich will close the last style. For example:

print("[bold red]Bold and red[/] not bold or red")

These markup tags may be use in combination with each other and don’t need to be strictly nested. The following example demonstrates overlapping of markup tags:

print("[bold]Bold[italic] bold and italic [/bold]italic[/italic]")

Errors

Rich will raise MarkupError if the markup contains one of the following errors:

  • Mismatched tags, e.g. "[bold]Hello[/red]"

  • No matching tag for implicit close, e.g. "no tags[/]"

Escaping

Occasionally you may want to print something that Rich would interpret as markup. You can escape a tag by preceding it with a backslash. Here’s an example:

>>> from rich import print
>>> print(r"foo\[bar]")
foo[bar]

Without the backslash, Rich will assume that [bar] is a tag and remove it from the output if there is no “bar” style.

Note

If you want to prevent the backslash from escaping the tag and output a literal backslash before a tag you can enter two backslashes.

The function escape() will handle escaping of text for you.

Escaping is important if you construct console markup dynamically, with str.format or f strings (for example). Without escaping it may be possible to inject tags where you don’t want them. Consider the following function:

def greet(name):
    console.print(f"Hello {name}!")

Calling greet("Will") will print a greeting, but if you were to call greet("[blink]Gotcha![/blink]") then you will also get blinking text, which may not be desirable. The solution is to escape the arguments:

from rich.markup import escape
def greet(name):
    console.print(f"Hello {escape(name)}!")

Emoji

If you add an emoji code to markup it will be replaced with the equivalent unicode character. An emoji code consists of the name of the emoji surrounded be colons (:). Here’s an example:

>>> from rich import print
>>> print(":warning:")
⚠️

Some emojis have two variants, the “emoji” variant displays in full color, and the “text” variant displays in monochrome (whatever your default colors are set to). You can specify the variant you want by adding either “-emoji” or “-text” to the emoji code. Here’s an example:

>>> from rich import print
>>> print(":red_heart-emoji:")
>>> print(":red_heart-text:")

To see a list of all the emojis available, run the following command:

python -m rich.emoji

Rendering Markup

By default, Rich will render console markup when you explicitly pass a string to print() or implicitly when you embed a string in another renderable object such as Table or Panel.

Console markup is convenient, but you may wish to disable it if the syntax clashes with the string you want to print. You can do this by setting markup=False on the print() method or on the Console constructor.

Markup API

You can convert a string to styled text by calling from_markup(), which returns a Text instance you can print or add more styles to.