ansifilter documentation

Ansifilter documentation

Imagine you want to read some logfiles from a UNIX or Linux based program and you get the following:

This is a text file containing ANSI codes, which are used to output formatted text in UNIX or Linux terminals. This is nice as long as your terminal supports these codes, but what to do if you use a Windows editor? What to do if the developer adjusted the colours of the logging output to suit his yellow-on-green coloured terminal, but you have a black-on-white setup?
You can't solve all problems by installing Cygwin, so ansifilter comes to the rescue:

These screenshots show the Windows and Linux versions of the GUI, which displays a ANSI cluttered file.
Ansifilter strips ANSI codes or converts them to HTML, TeX, LaTeX, RTF or BBCode if you want to preserve the formatting information.

The utility is also available as command line interface:

ansifilter ansifile.txt will give:

Several ANSI codes:
Bold
Underline
Black
Red
Green
Red Background
Green Background
Image inverted and back

ansifilter --html ansifile.txt will give:

Several ANSI codes:
Bold
Underline
Black
Red
Green
Red Background
Green Background
Image inverted and back

Features

These are the options of the command line interface:

File handling:
  -i, --input=<file>   name of single input file
  -o, --output=<file>  name of single output file
  -O, --outdir<dir>   name of output directory
  -t, --tail           Continue reading after end-of-file (like tail -f)
                       Use system tail if available

Output text formats:
  -T, --text (default) Output text
  -H, --html           Output HTML
  -L, --latex          Output LaTeX
  -P, --tex            Output Plain TeX
  -R, --rtf            Output RTF
  -B, --bbcode         Output BBCode

Formatted text options:
  -d, --doc-title      Set HTML/LaTeX document title
  -e, --encoding       Set HTML encoding (must match input file encoding)
  -f, --fragment       Omit HTML header and footer
  -F, --font=<font>    Set HTML/RTF font face
  -r, --style-ref=<rf> Set HTML/TeX/LaTeX stylesheet path
  -s, --font-size<fs> Set HTML/RTF font size
  -p, --plain          Ignore ANSI formatting information

Other options:
  -h, --help           Print help
  -v, --version        Print version and license info

Examples:

ansifilter -i text_with_ansi.txt -o text_without_ansi.txt
ansifilter *.txt
tail -f server.log | ansifilter

The GUI version also accepts the first command line argument as input file name.

Supported control sequences

Formatting:
Bold, Underline, Italic, Blink

Colors:
Black, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Magenta, Cyan, White, xterm 256 color codes

Other:
Conceal/Reveal, Image positive/negative