How to remove the decorate colors characters in bash output?

Question

A console program (translate-shell) has an output with colors and uses special decorate characters for this: ^[[22m, ^[[24m, ^[[1m... and so on.

I'd like to remove them to get a plain text.

I tried with tr -d "^[[22m" and with sed 's/[\^[[22m]//g', but only is removed the number, not the special character ^[

Thanks.

Rajput

Answer 1

You have multiple options:

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14684/removing-control-chars-including-console-codes-colours-from-script-output
• http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3584/remove-color-codes-special-characters-with-sed
• and as -no-ansi as pointed out by Jens in other answer

EDIT

The solution from commandlinefu does the job pretty well:

sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[m|K]//g"

The solution from unix.stackexchange might be better but is much longer and so you would want to create a separate script file because it is so long instead of just doing a shell one-liner.

Dorene

The option in commandlinefu works perfectly, thanks: sed -r "s/\x1B[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[m|K]//g" – Rajput

This is a link-only answer; please provide the relevant details in the answer itself. – Ge

the 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*m//g' regex works better – Latea

Answer 2

I found this in the manual about the use of ANSI escape codes:

-no-ansi
    Do not use ANSI escape codes.

So you should add this option when starting the program.

Misdirect

No, that option remove other characters too (á é í ó ú ñ...) – Rajput

@GeaPlanet Then you are doing something wrong. Those characters are NOT ansi escapes and should not be effected by -no-ansi. This sounds more like a configuration problem to me (or a bug in translate-shell). – Misdirect