I'm writing a Python program that logs terminal interaction (similar to the script program), and I'd like to filter out the VT100 escape sequences before writing to disk. I'd like to use a function like this:
def strip_escapes(buf):
escape_regex = re.compile(???) # <--- this is what I'm looking for
return escape_regex.sub('', buf)
What should go in escape_regex
?
The combined expression for escape sequences can be something generic like this:
(\x1b\[|\x9b)[^@-_]*[@-_]|\x1b[@-_]
Should be used with re.I
This incorporates:
- Two-byte sequences, i.e.
\x1b
followed by a character in the range of @
until _
.
- One-byte CSI, i.e.
\x9b
as opposed to \x1b + "["
.
However, this will not work for sequences that define key mappings or otherwise included strings wrapped in quotes.
VT100 codes are already grouped(mostly) according to similar patterns here:
http://ascii-table.com/ansi-escape-sequences-vt-100.php
I think the simplest approach would be to use some tool like regexbuddy to define a regex for each VT100 codes group.
I found the following solution to successfully parse vt100 color codes and remove the non-printable escape sequences. The code snippet found here successfully removed all codes for me when running a telnet session using telnetlib:
def __processReadLine(self, line_p):
'''
remove non-printable characters from line <line_p>
return a printable string.
'''
line, i, imax = '', 0, len(line_p)
while i < imax:
ac = ord(line_p[i])
if (32<=ac<127) or ac in (9,10): # printable, \t, \n
line += line_p[i]
elif ac == 27: # remove coded sequences
i += 1
while i<imax and line_p[i].lower() not in 'abcdhsujkm':
i += 1
elif ac == 8 or (ac==13 and line and line[-1] == ' '): # backspace or EOL spacing
if line:
line = line[:-1]
i += 1
return line