write colored font in email using tcl

Question

I automate a network switch using Tcl and expect scripts on my Fedora 12. The test logs and result with attachments are sent to an email inbox (office 365)-browser and outlook modes.

I would like to know if there is a way to make the color fonts appear in my email using TCL or shell script.

For example in the report sent to email, the text "Passed" should appear in Green-bold and the font "failed" must appear in Red-bold. Will tput be useful? Please help. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Just use html email (with content-type: text/html header) and inline css to colorize it.

Passed should be

<span style="color:green"><font color="green"></font></span>

Here span provides styling
font provides fallback if span does not work. Some email clients may strip those inline styles.

Answer 2

You are asking for two different things: color text in email and color text in the shell. The others already answer the email part, so I would like to address the shell part. For terminal output, I use the term::ansi::send package. Here is a sample:

package require cmdline
package require term::ansi::send

proc color_puts {args} {
    # Parse the command line args
    set options {
        {bg.arg default "The background color"}
        {fg.arg default "The foreground color"}
        {nonewline "" "no ending new line"}
        {channel.arg stdout "Which channel to write to"}
    }
    array set opt [cmdline::getoptions args $options]

    # Set the foreground/background colors
    ::term::ansi::send::sda_fg$opt(fg)
    ::term::ansi::send::sda_bg$opt(bg)

    # puts
    if {$opt(nonewline)} {
        puts -nonewline $opt(channel) [lindex $args end]
    } else {
        puts $opt(channel) [lindex $args end]
    }

    # Reset the foreground/background colors to default
    ::term::ansi::send::sda_fgdefault
    ::term::ansi::send::sda_bgdefault
}

#
# Test
#

puts "\n"
color_puts -nonewline -fg magenta "TEST"
color_puts -nonewline -fg blue    " RESULTS"
puts "\n"

color_puts -fg green "test_001 Up/down direction movements passed"
color_puts -fg red "test_002 Left/right direction movements failed"

Discussion

• The applicable flags to color_puts are -bg for background color, -fg for foreground color, -nonewline for suppressing the new line character output, and -channel to direct the output to the file.
• The available colors are black, blue, red, green, yellow, magenta, cyan, white, and default. For more information, look up the term::ansi::send package.