What is wrong with control characters in PHPUnit command line tool?

Question

When I run phpunit from a command line, the control characters are being printed out instead of acting like control characters. Take look at this:

PHPUnit 3.6.5 by Sebastian Bergmann.

Configuration read from app\phpunit.xml.dist

...

Time: 1 second, Memory: 12.00Mb

‹[30;42m‹[2KOK (3 tests, 3 assertions)
‹[0m‹[2K

I assume that signs like ‹[30;42m< are some kind of control characters and should be used by console in different way (positioning the cursor, deleting characters etc.)

What can be wrong here?

Answer 1

This happens because you have configured phpunit to use colors.

<phpunit colors="true"

but sadly it is not possible to create colored output on a Windows terminal.

There is an open issue to not show those chars on windows where they can't be translated into colors on the phpunit issues tracker and I'm working on a patch for that.

For now all you can do is to ether accept it or to remove the color="true" from your phpunit.xml configuration file.

Answer 2

Alternatively, just use https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon/releases to get ansi colors on windows.

Source code: https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon