Cucumber's ANSI colors messing up emacs compil

Question

When working in Emacs, I use the compile command (F12 by default) to run programs. When I run Cucumber in Emacs, Cucumber spits out ANSI colors that the Emacs compilation mode doesn't interpret. The result is ugly and hard to read. Here's a snippet of the *compilation* buffer showing the ugly:

^[[31m(::) failed steps (::)^[[0m

The command I'm using:

( cd ~/lab/rails/todolist && rake cucumber:all )

Versions:

• Emacs 23.1
• Cucumber 0.8.3
• Cucumber-rails 0.3.2

The world would be sunshine and birds singing if I could:

• Get Emacs to interpret ANSI color codes in its compilation buffer, or
• Get Cucumber to stop spitting out ANSI color codes

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I use this to turn on ansi color interpretation in my compilation buffer:

(require 'ansi-color)
(defun colorize-compilation-buffer ()
  (let ((inhibit-read-only t))
    (ansi-color-apply-on-region (point-min) (point-max))))
(add-hook 'compilation-filter-hook 'colorize-compilation-buffer)

Answer 2

I improve code so it doesn't pollute M-x grep like commands and more efficient:

(ignore-errors
  (require 'ansi-color)
  (defun my-colorize-compilation-buffer ()
    (when (eq major-mode 'compilation-mode)
      (ansi-color-apply-on-region compilation-filter-start (point-max))))
  (add-hook 'compilation-filter-hook 'my-colorize-compilation-buffer))