Why in rails CLI do I constantly see "←[32m.←[0m"

Question

I am a newbie trying to follow Michael Hartl's excellent rails tutorial. I have upgraded to rails 3.2.3 and ruby 1.9.3 which I run on windows vista. The problem occurs when I run certain command line functions such as rspec. eg

C:\Sites\rails_projects\sample_app>bundle exec rspec spec/
←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m← [32m.←[0m
←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m
←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m←[32m.←[0m

Finished in 5.41 seconds
←[32m29 examples, 0 failures←[0m

I thought the problem might be related to it trying to show colours but I have tried running rspec with the --color tag and there is no difference (or any colour). I have also seen the problem in the rails console itself. Perhaps my machine is not set up to display certain characters correctly.

Any help would be gratefully received!

thanks

Answer 1

They are terminal control characters, they can be used to change the colour of the terminal as suggested in the question and also to move the cursor and delete characters. If these appear with colour disabled then I would assume they are cursor movement control characters.

EDIT:

http://www.termsys.demon.co.uk/vtansi.htm lists the VT100 control characters. It appears that it is attempting to set the text color, to green.

Answer 2

1. Open the .rspec file in your application directory
2. remove the first line (--color)
3. Save, done :-)