How can I screen-scrape output from telnet in Perl?

Question

I can setup a telnet connection in Perl no problems, and have just discovered Curses, and am wondering if I can use the two together to scrape the output from the telnet session.

I can view on a row, column basis the contents of STDOUT using the simple script below:

use Curses;
my $win = new Curses;
$win->addstr(10, 10, 'foo');
$win->refresh;
my $thischar=$win->inch(10,10);
print "Char $thischar\n";

And using the below I can open a telnet connection and send \ receive commands with no problem:

use net::telnet;
my $telnet = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 9999,);
$telnet->open($ipaddress) or die "telnet open failed\n";
$telnet->login($user,$pass);
my $output = $telnet->cmd("command string");

... But what I would really like to do is get the telnet response (which will include terminal control characters) and then search on a row \ column basis using curses. Does anyone know of a way I can connect the two together? It seems to me that curses can only operate on STDOUT

Answer 1

Curses does the opposite. It is a C library for optimising screen updates from a program writing to a terminal, originally designed to be used over a slow serial connection. It has no ability to scrape a layout from a sequence of control characters.

A better bet would be a terminal emulator that has an API with the ability to do this type of screen scraping. Off the top of my head I'm not sure if any Open-source terminal emulators do this, but there are certainly commercial ones available that can.