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Remove terminal colour codes from a text file that was piped in to

Last Updated: [2023-03-29 Wed 07:07]

I have made this mistake in the past: Piped the output of a file into a document only to find I’ve accidentally pipped the terminal colour information into the file too (e.g. the output of jq -C . into a JSON file, which, of course, makes it unparsable. Thankfully, sed and regex can come to the rescue here:

Linux and WSL

FILE=textfile.txt ; cat "${FILE}" | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}(;[0-9]{1,2};?)?)?[mGK]//g" | sponge "${FILE}"

macOS

You will need gsed and sponge from Homebrew

FILE=textfile.txt ; cat "${FILE}" | gsed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}(;[0-9]{1,2};?)?)?[mGK]//g" | sponge "${FILE}"

Job’s a goodun!

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