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I've got a file that's full of VT100 color codes, which is making it hard to search. Is there a unix utility that can strip those out so I'm left with plain text?

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5 Answers

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This might help:

esc=$'\033'
sed "s/${esc}[^m]*m//g" inputfile
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the strings command possibly!

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I tried that, it leaves a bunch of [01;34m strings – jes5199 Jun 23 '10 at 19:12
ok then pipe it to sed with the appropriate edits and yes there's got to be a better way. – tony roth Jun 23 '10 at 19:18
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Try catting it through col -b

cat file | col -b

This works for stripping the troff/nroff formatting for man pages. Worth a try.

If that doesn't work, there's quite a good thread on perlmonks:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=132997

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Try this - it's old but probably works.

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Trying to cleanup the output of a script run?

I remember there was a script that did exactly this on some system I used to have access to... I think it was the University of Waterloo Math Department's Unix machines.

But I think some clever bastard there wrote it a while ago. Find a friend still at UW :)

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