How to remove ^[, and all of the escape sequences in a file using linux shell scripting

user_823018 0
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We want to remove ^[, and all of the escape sequences.

sed is not working and is giving us this error:

$ sed 's/^[//g' oldfile > newfile; mv newfile oldfile;
sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command

$ sed -i '' -e 's/^[//g' somefile
sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command
shell scripting linux
14 Answers

I don't have enough reputation to add a comment to the answer given by Luke H, but I did want to share the regular expression that I've been using to eliminate all of the ASCII Escape Sequences.

sed -r 's~\x01?(\x1B\(B)?\x1B\[([0-9;]*)?[JKmsu]\x02?~~g'
user_67804450

You can remove all non printable characters with this:

sed 's/[^[:print:]]//g'

user_106126840

sed based approach without extended regular expressions enabled by -r

sed 's/\x1B\[[0-9;]*[JKmsu]//g'
user_27893120

Tom Hale's answer left unwanted codes, but was a good base to work from. Adding additional filtering cleared out leftover, unwanted codes:

sed -e "s,^[[[(][0-9;?]*[a-zA-Z],,g" \
    -e "s/^[[[][0-9][0-9]*[@]//" \
    -e "s/^[[=0-9]<[^>]*>//" \
    -e "s/^[[)][0-9]//" \
    -e "s/.^H//g" \
    -e "s/^M//g" \
    -e "s/^^H//" \
        file.dirty > file.clean

As this was done on a non-GNU version of sed, where you see ^[, ^H, and ^M, I used Ctrl-V <Esc>, Ctrl-V Ctrl-H, and Ctrl-V Ctrl-M respectively. The ^> is literally a carat (^) and greater-than character, not Ctrl-<.

TERM=xterm was in use at the time.

user_8561720

A bash snippet I've been using for stripping out (at least some) ANSI colors:

shopt -s extglob
while IFS='' read -r line; do
  echo "${line//$'\x1b'\[*([0-9;])[Km]/}"
done
user_2926200
user_71588000

This simple awk solution worked for me, try this:

str="happy $(tput setaf 1)new$(tput sgr0) year!" #colored text
echo $str | awk '{gsub("(.\\[[0-9]+m|.\\(..\\[m)","",$0)}1' #remove ansi colors
user_97134110
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