Re: Construct ANSI colour codes

[Greg Wooledge]

Why are you making this so hard?

declare -A color=(
  [black]="$(tput setaf 0)"
  [red]="$(tput setaf 1)"
  [green]="$(tput setaf 2)"
  [yellow]="$(tput setaf 3)"
  [blue]="$(tput setaf 4)"
  [magenta]="$(tput setaf 5)"
  [cyan]="$(tput setaf 6)"
  [white]="$(tput setaf 7)"
)
sgr0="$(tput sgr0)"

echo "${color[green]}hello${sgr0} ${color[red]}world${sgr0}"
printf 'Price: %s$%.2f%s\n' "${color[blue]}" "$price" "$sgr0"

Or you can use scalar variables like "red" "blue" and so on, instead of
the associative array.

I gave two different examples for output.  You can use either, or both,
or come up with your own.

If you insist on initializing the color variables inside a function,
and if you go with the array, then you might want to add the -g option
to make it global.