Console protocol and highlighting

[FedeClaudi]

Hi Will,

I'm working on a symbolic maths CLI application (mathcli) and I'm using unicodeit + rich to make things look good.
In particular I have this ExpressionString class that takes care of moving between string, sympy, latex and unicode representations of the same mathematical expression. Of these the unicode one is what gets printed when using rich.print.

To make things like symbols or variables pop up I'm using a Highlighter, I create a Console that uses the highlighter and save it at rich._console such that every call to rich.print will use my console. The result is something like:

Now to the source of my confusion:

• If I give ExpressionString a method __rich__ that yields just Expression.unicode (the unicode formatted string), calling rich.print(my_expression) or rich.print(my_expression.unicode) give the same results:

• but if I use __rich_console__, which also just yields Expression.unicode, then print(my_expression.unicode) gets highlighted correctly but print(my_expression) print's the unicode representation with no highlighting:

I get it that print(my_expression.unicode), because it's given a str bypasses calls to __rich__ or __rich_console__ methods and therefore always gets highlighted. But I don't understand why a str returned by __rich_console__ doesn't get highlighted? I suppose it might have to do with the fact that __rich_console__ is reserved for 'fancier' renderables like Tables, but I would have expected that if both methods return the same string they would've have been printed the same way?

[willmcgugan]

Hi Federico,

That sounds like a bug. I would have expected it to be treated in the same way. Leave it with me.

In the meantime you could yield console.highlighter(my_expression.unicode) from __rich_console__ for the same effect.

[willmcgugan]

Give 9.5.0 (just released) a try. It should treat strings from __rich__ or __rich_console__ in the same way.

[FedeClaudi]

works perfectly, thanks!