Color text output from python

At the moment I run a minimization routine build in Cython/Python that outputs a lot of text to the terminal. Not all text is equally interesting and I was wondering if it is difficult to output some of the more important messages in a different color. It turns out that this is very easy. On stackoverflow Dietrich Epp posted a nice example which I have changed a little to select the color with a single character string:

def hilite(string, status, bold):
    attr = []
    if(sys.stdout.isatty()):
        if status=='g':
            # green
            attr.append('32')
        elif status=='r':
            # red
            attr.append('31')
        elif status=='y':
            # yellow
            attr.append('33')    
        elif status=='b':
            # blue
            attr.append('34')
        elif status=='m':
            # magenta
            attr.append('35')
        if bold:
            attr.append('1')

        return '\x1b[%sm%s\x1b[0m' % (';'.join(attr), string)
    else:
        return(string)

More info on ANSI escape codes is given on Wikipedia. You can also do things like underline. So far I have only tested this on Linux so I do not know if it also works on Windows.

Update:
This does not work on Windows (windows terminals do not work with ANSI codes). Luckily there is a python package you can use to make it work on windows after all: colorama. Simply call colorama.init()
(after import colorama) and you can use the above code again. However, I noticed that if you use ipython this garbles your prompt (and other things). To work around this I call colorama.init() in the functions that use the ANSI codes in the output. Then when the script is finished you have to call colorama.deinit() and ipython will behave normally.