ANSI Color Codes in brief:

	  0	   to restore default color
	  1	   for brighter colors
	  4	   for underlined text
	  5	   for flashing text
	 30	   for black foreground
	 31	   for red foreground
	 32	   for green foreground
	 33	   for yellow (or brown) foreground
	 34	   for blue foreground
	 35	   for purple foreground
	 36	   for cyan foreground
	 37	   for white (or gray) foreground
	 40	   for black background
	 41	   for red background
	 42	   for green background
	 43	   for yellow (or brown) background
	 44	   for blue background
	 45	   for purple background
	 46	   for cyan background
	 47	   for white (or gray) background

you use the above codes together with an escape sequence like this (replace the '#' with the colour code of your choice) :

\e[#m

Once you've used an escape all subsequent text will be affected until you use the reset escape

\e[0m

so if I want to format a part of a line of text, instead of:

print "This boring old line of text was supposed to have red text\n";

do this:

print "This new improved, brighter, more interesting line of text has \e[31mred text\e[0m\n" ;

If you want to use two escapes on the same piece of text 
use one of these ';' :

\e[#;#m

print "This \e[5m new improved \e[0m, \e[5m brighter \e[0m, more 
\e[5minteresting \e[0m line of text has \e[31;5mflashing red 
text\e[0m\n" ;