From Newsgroup: alt.bbs

On 3/6/23 03:29, Simon Tatham wrote:

"G.K." <g@k.invalid> writes:

Another distinction occurs to me that might ease the problem
requirement. Is there a cheap way to distinguish between control codes
and formatting codes (color, foreground, background, underline,
blinkenlights) codes in a text stream.

'less -R' does something along those lines. I don't know if the
filtering code is conveniently separable from the rest of 'less', but
it might be a start: somebody else has already done the work of making a
set of decisions about which codes count in which category.

This solves the problem. This is a boon and does almost all the work necessary. From the less manual:

[quote]
-R or --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
Like -r, but only ANSI "color" escape sequences are output in "raw"
form. Unlike -r, the screen appearance is maintained correctly in most cases. ANSI "color" escape sequences are sequences of the form:

ESC [ ... m

where the "..." is zero or more color specification characters For the purpose of keeping track of screen appearance, ANSI color escape
sequences are assumed to not move the cursor. [/quote]

After this I can pipe through a few intelligent line length and UTF-8 validation checks and ship it.
--

G.K.
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