Removing colors from output

Question

According to Wikipedia, the [m|K] in the sed command you're using is specifically designed to handle m (the color command) and K (the "erase part of line" command). Your script is trying to set absolute cursor position to 60 (^[[60G) to get all the OKs in a line, which your sed line doesn't cover.

(Properly, [m|K] should probably be (m|K) or [mK], because you're not trying to match a pipe character. But that's not important right now.)

If you switch that final match in your command to [mGK] or (m|G|K), you should be able to catch that extra control sequence.

./somescript | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[mGK]//g"

IMHO, most of these answers try too hard to restrict what is inside the escape code. As a result, they end up missing common codes like [38;5;60m (foreground ANSI color 60 from 256-color mode).

They also require the -r option which enables GNU extensions. These are not required; they just make the regex read better.

Here is a simpler answer that handles the 256-color escapes and works on systems with non-GNU sed:

./somescript | sed 's/\x1B\[[0-9;]\{1,\}[A-Za-z]//g'

This will catch anything that starts with [, has any number of decimals and semicolons, and ends with a letter. This should catch any of the common ANSI escape sequences.

For funsies, here's a larger and more general (but minimally tested) solution for all conceivable ANSI escape sequences:

./somescript | sed 's/\x1B[@A-Z\\\]^_]\|\x1B\[[0-9:;<=>?]*[-!"#$%&'"'"'()*+,.\/]*[][\\@A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]//g'

(and if you have @edi9999's SI problem, add | sed "s/\x0f//g" to the end; this works for any control char by replacing 0f with the hex of the undesired char)

I couldn't get decent results from any of the other answers, but the following worked for me:

somescript | sed -r "s/[[:cntrl:]]\[[0-9]{1,3}m//g"

If I only removed the control char "^[", it left the rest of the color data, e.g., "33m". Including the color code and "m" did the trick. I'm puzzled with s/\x1B//g doesn't work because \x1B[31m certainly works with echo.

For Mac OSX or BSD use

./somescript | sed $'s,\x1b\\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g'

The regular expression below will miss some ANSI Escape Codes sequences, as well as 3 digit colors. Example and Fix on regex101.com.

Use this instead:

./somescript | sed -r 's/\x1B\[(;?[0-9]{1,3})+[mGK]//g'

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I also had the problem that sometimes, the SI character appeared.

It happened for example with this input : echo "$(tput setaf 1)foo$(tput sgr0) bar"

Here's a way to also strip the SI character (shift in) (0x0f)

./somescript | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[mGK]//g" | sed "s/\x0f//g"