ANSI Escape Codes in Python

ANSI escape codes are surprisingly useful. For Python, the escape code is "\x1b[". Here is an example loading bar. This is a Unix thing, won't work on windows.

sys.stderr.write("\x1b[34mloading[" + " "*10 + "]\x1b[0m\r")
sys.stderr.write("\x1b[8C")
for i in range(10):
   sys.stderr.write('.')
sys.stderr.write('\n') 

Here "\x1b[34" is "colour foreground red", and "\x1b[8C" means move the cursor right 8 spaces"

It prints out something like this, but with loading in red:
loading[..........]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code