Ytdyklly

Updating Gilles' answer to also remove carriage returns and do backspace-erasing of previous characters, which were both important to me for a typescript generated on Cygwin:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while (<>) {

    s/ e[ #%()*+-./]. |

       r | # Remove extra carriage returns also

       (?:e[|x9b) [ -?]* [@-~] | # CSI ... Cmd

       (?:e]|x9d) .*? (?:e\|[ax9c]) | # OSC ... (ST|BEL)

       (?:e[P^_]|[x90x9ex9f]) .*? (?:e\|x9c) | # (DCS|PM|APC) ... ST

       e.|[x80-x9f] //xg;

       1 while s/[^b][b]//g;  # remove all non-backspace followed by backspace

    print;

}

I would use sed in this case.

do:

cat -v typescript | sed -e "s/x1b[.{1,5}m//g"

sed -e "s/search/replace/g" is standard stuff. the regex is explained as below:

x1b match the Escape preceeding the color code
[ matches the first open bracket
.{1,5} matches 1 to 5 of any single character. Have to the curly braces to keep the shell from mangling them.
m last character in regex - usually trails the color code.
// empty string for what to replace everything with.
g match it multiple times per line.

cat typescript | perl -pe 's/e([^[]]|[.*?[a-zA-Z]|].*?a)//g' | col -b > typescript-processed

# The "sed -r" trick does not work on every Linux, I still dunno why:

DECOLORIZE='eval sed "s,${END}[[0-9;]*[m|K],,g"'

=> howto use:

<commands that type colored output> | ${DECOLORIZE}

tested on:
- AIX 5.x / 6.1 / 7.1
- Linux Mandrake / Mandriva / SLES / Fedora
- SunOS

I solved the problem by running scriptreplay in a screen and the dumping the scrollback buffer to a file.

The following expect script does this for you.

It has been tested for logfiles with up to 250.000 lines. In the working directory you need your scriptlog, a file called "time" with 10.000.000 times the line "1 10" in it, and the script. I needs the name of your scriptfile as command line argument, like ./name_of_script name_of_scriptlog.

#!/usr/bin/expect -f 



set logfile [lindex $argv 0]



if {$logfile == ""} {puts "Usage: ./script_to_readable.exp $logfile."; exit}



set timestamp [clock format [clock sec] -format %Y-%m-%d,%H:%M:%S]

set pwd [exec pwd]

if {! [file exists ${pwd}/time]} {puts "ERROR: time file not found.nYou need a file named time with 10.000.000 times the line "1 10" in the working directory for this script to work. Please provide it."; exit}

set wc [exec cat ${pwd}/$logfile | wc -l]

set height [ expr "$wc" + "100" ]

system cp $logfile ${logfile}.tmp

system echo $timestamp >> ${logfile}.tmp

set timeout -1

spawn screen -h $height -S $timestamp 

send "scriptreplay -t time -s ${logfile}.tmp 100000 2>/dev/nullr"

expect ${timestamp} 

send "x01:hardcopy -h readablelog.${timestamp}r"



send "exitr"



system sed '/^$/d' readablelog.$timestamp >> readablelog2.$timestamp

system head -n-2 readablelog2.$timestamp >> ${logfile}.readable.$timestamp

system rm -f readablelog.$timestamp readablelog2.$timestamp ${logfile}.tmp

The time file can be generated by

for i in $(seq 1 10000000); do echo "1 10" >> time; done

Found this question while looking for the a solution to the same problem. A little more digging and found this script over at Live Journal at this link. I worked perfectly for me. It's also a very good write up about this problem and how the solution works. Definitely worth a read.
http://jdimpson.livejournal.com/7040.html

#!/usr/bin/perl -wp



# clean up control characters and other non-text detritus that shows up 

# when you run the "script" command.



BEGIN {

# xterm titlebar escape sequence

$xtermesc = "x1bx5dx30x3b";



# the occurence of a backspace event (e.g. cntrl H, cntrol W, or cntrl U)

$backspaceevent = "x1b\x5bx4b"; # note escaping of third character



# ANSI color escape sequence

$ansiesc = qr/x1b[[d;]*?m/;



# technically, this is arrow-right. For some reason, being used against

# very long backspace jobs. I don't fully understand this, as evidenced

# by the fact that is off by one sometimes.

$bizarrebs = qr/x1b[C/;



# used as part of the xterm titlebar mechanism, or when

# a bell sounds, which might happen when you backspace too much.

$bell = "x07"; # could use a



$cr = "x0d"; # could use r



$backspace = "x08"; # could use b

}



s/$xtermesc.+?$bell//g;

s/[$cr$bell]//g;

s/${backspaceevent}//g;

s/$ansiesc//g;

while (s/(.)(?=$backspace)//) { s/$backspace//; } # frickin' sweet 

# For every ^H delete the character immediately left of it, then delete the ^H.

# Perl's RE's aren't R, so I wonder if I could do this in one expression.

while (s/(..)(?=$bizarrebs)//) { s/$bizarrebs//; }

I found that just using cat was all I needed to view the output of script in the terminal. This doesn't help when redirecting the output to another file, but does make the result readable, unlike cat -v, col -b, or a text editor.

To eliminate colors or save the results to a file, manually copy and paste the output from cat into a text editor, or into another cat command, i.e.:

cat > endResult << END

<paste_copied_text_here>

END

Following up on the last answer which uses tr and :cntrl: could we maybe do

sed "/^[[:cntrl:]]/d" output.txt

This seems to work for me because all lines generated by vi start with a control character. It happens to also strip out blank lines and lines that start with a tab, although that works for what I'm doing. Maybe there is a way to match any control character except for n m t.

Maybe we can search for the particular control character, and it looks like all junk lines generated by vi start with what looks like ^[. hexdump tells me the first character is 1b, so this seems to work too

sed "/^x1b/d" output.txt

This looks similar to an answer posted above, but it does not work properly because after running the command, some junk chars are already added to the command line as if the user had typed them.