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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

Python is a great language for iterating over collections - lists, tuples, dicts, sets, etc. - and all those elifs don't look very Pythonic to me. Let's clean it up a little:

    colors = ('grey', 'red', 'green', 'yellow', 'blue', 'magenta', 'cyan')
    for char in string:
        print termcolor.colored(char, colors[string.index(char)%7])

View on HN

Better yet use enumerate to save looking up the character index:

    for i,char in enumerate(string):
        print termcolor.colored(char, colors[i%7])

You can get rid of that unpleasant indexing:

(3.2)

    from itertools import cycle
    for colour, character in zip(cycle(colours), string):
      print(termcolor.colored(character, colour))

(2.7)

    from itertools import cycle, izip
    for colour, character in izip(cycle(colours, string):
      print termcolor.colored(character, colour)

Sweet. Thanks.

Both would work just fine. Good Points.

the first doesn't work correctly for all strings (those with duplicate characters). the second is the right way to do it.

Good point. I should know better than to dash off a quick code sample on HN without first running a test suite. :)

Both versions will work just fine. And number mod 7 will give an index of 0 to 6, which covers any color index from the colors tuple. Also, I tested it out just in case.

EDIT: The only issue is that if the string has a repeated letter it will be the same color.

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