weird characters in log session

[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

Hello everyone,

I use iTerm quite sometime now, but only recently I needed to enable the log session.

when not in plain text I get a lot of weird characters.

I believe that is because I use fish as a shell, but would love to keep it and have the logs as expected if possible. I seen similar behavior when on zsh but seems to work fine with bash

Any ideas?

Thanks

Last login: Mon Aug 23 09:27:59 on ttys001

Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell

Type [32mhelp (B [m for instructions on how to use fish

[?2004h ]0;fish /Users/user [30m (B [m

[92muser (B [m@ (B [mgrathdt27170 (B [m [32m~ (B [m (B [m> [K

[24Chost www.google.com

[43C [19D [38;2;0;95;215mhost [30m (B [m [38;2;0;175;255mwww.google.com

[43C [30m (B [m

[30m (B [m [?2004l ]0;host www.google.com /Users/user [30m (B [m

www.google.com has address 142.250.186.36

www.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:4017:806::2004

[2m⏎ (B [m

⏎

[K [?2004h ]0;fish /Users/user [30m (B [m

[92muser (B [m@ (B [mgrathdt27170 (B [m [32m~ (B [m (B [m> [K

[24C ]0;fish /Users/user [30m (B [m

[92muser (B [m@ (B [mgrathdt27170 (B [m [32m~ (B [m (B [m> [J

[24C ]0;fish /Users/user [30m (B [m

[92muser (B [m@ (B [mgrathdt27170 (B [m [32m~ (B [m (B [m> [J

[24C

[Richard Mitchell]

Those look like normal ascii escape codes to enable colors, etc.  I'm guessing both your fish and zsh setup colorizes output and  bash does not?

[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

yes indeed they are, but I am not sure if I can have the fish/zsh colorization and the log session.

plain text works as fine, in log session btw

[Richard Mitchell]

Your options, as I see it, are:

1: disable fancy colorizations for purpose of saving a log session

2: post filter the log session to remove escape codes

3: wait for George to add another option.

for number 1,  I assume you're only saving selective sessions, not everything.

for number 2, lolcat has a routine to filter out escape codes (otherwise it would fail in exciting ways),

I suspect there are other more direct tools for doing the same.

[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

1. well plain text works for now without weird characters so this is what I am using, or just go with bash

2. did not know this was doable , I will have a look

thanks for your response !!

[George Nachman]

I think what you’re asking for is to log to a format like RTF so that you can see colors without control sequences?

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[Adrian Bool]

Hi Ioannis,

On 24 Aug 2021, at 14:27, Ioannis Tsitsiklis <i.tsit...@gmail.com> wrote:

1. well plain text works for now without weird characters so this is what I am using, or just go with bash

2. did not know this was doable , I will have a look

One easy thing you could try, is using,

less -R <filename>

I think you you find that shows the content of the file with the colour intact — not showing the control chars themselves.  Perhaps this is even better than filtering that data out at source?

Cheers,

aid

[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

That would be great if possible

[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

I am not sure it works as expected. I get the random characters but with colour 

or I am not using the command properly

I attached a sample if that helps

[Adrian Bool]

Hi Ioannis

On my (Catlina) system, viewing your provided file using less with no additional parameters gives me:

Using less -R gives me:

And then "less -r" (i.e. lower case) gives me the slightly better:

Further down the file I can still see the ^H (backspace) chars:

Using "less -rU <filename>" tidies these up:

Good to check "echo $LESS" to see if you have any settings within an environment variable.  Personally, I do set this environment variable in my ~/.profile with:

export LESS=-Xr

Do get the same?

(All screenshots taken from within iTerm, of course! ;-) )

Cheers,

aid

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<logtest.log>

[Richard Mitchell]

great analysis!

I was going to post a screenshot (png) of just the first 20 lines or so, but kept getting an "error" (with no indication from google the actual error), so I gave up.  Yours was a much better response.

[George Nachman]

RTF is a bad choice because it doesn’t seem you can append to it, and I don’t want to keep the whole thing in memory as one giant string.

The next most obvious choice is HTML. It’ll be wordy and barely valid, though. Something like:

<span style=“background-color: #000; color: #fff”>hello <b>world</b></span>

If anyone’s got a better idea I’m all ears :)

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[George Nachman]

Commit afffabf8c396e5f753943493497629187b17bda3 adds support for logging as HTML. It’ll be in the next nightly build, due out in 14 hours.

[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

Thank you all for the interest so far.

I tested the nightly build a bit.

The HTML type seems to be working fine, although I have not done any extensive test, but so far all good.

I would appreciate if you could let me know off the following as well, because I think I broke something in my item installation.

I have not noticed that before since I never used the logging option prior to my post.

In both the nightly and stable build, either on fish shell or bash, I get in the log every keypress, such as up arrow, or left arrow to fill a command etc.

I am attaching also examples .

In the fish shell I get the whole "command", you can see a lot of repeated "dig www.google.com" for example. These are up-arrows

In  bash you can see the characters "[K" or [C"

Maybe it is normal but just wanted to know if it is normal.

Again thank you very much for the help

[George Nachman]

Yes, this is normal. The raw data log includes everything sent by the shell. Different shells will redraw in their own ways.

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[Ioannis Tsitsiklis]

Thanks for replying George.

I just discovered that this happens on all 3 different Linux machines I use as well, so I guess it is a Nix thing.

Really appreciate the help

HTML format for logs is working quite well for me ;)