The Unix way seems to be to not solve the problem at all, unless you're writing a text editor, and then you reinvent the wheel and solve it yourself.
It has good test coverage, fails safe (if it doesn't understand a sequence, it still strips the escape character), and can preserve colors in cleaned up text. It is directly and indirectly used by quite a few projects. It receives extremely few bug reports, because I took the time to do it right.
If you want a good way to do this, probably start here. It's three short regular expressions and a simple state machine (to clean up single-line edits).
My only complaint about the code at this point is it operates on string instead of []byte, but I don't want to break the API and nobody has complained.
There are many reasons users might not want/be able to use Go, or any other language this might be published in. Given the terminal's provenance I can't help but be absolutely certain (despite having no substantive evidence) a lot of people working with C in Interesting™ situations would love something like this, for example.
(I must admit I skimmed it so fast (on my phone) I didn't realize the comment about RGB colors was only referring to the line directly underneath... and then didn't stop to think "RGB can't need all that", woops.)
The nice thing is this is definitely simple enough to be able to just directly port somewhere else, which I guess would make extracting a higher level representation premature-optimization-level superfluous complexity.
*Adds to bookmarks*
Apache 1.3 (way back when) would escape escape sequences before printing them to the log, to prevent this exact same thing.
It is the responsibility of the program dumping data to the terminal to escape things prior to dumping to the tty.
It also probably doesn't help that the problem is unfixable in general without rewriting so much software... and that things mostly work okay, most of the time.
As opposed to what, the ẃ͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́̂́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́᷅́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́̂́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͅͅͅͅͅͅͅͅé͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́̂́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́᷅́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́̂́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͅͅͅͅͅͅͅͅb͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔͔̩͔́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́̂́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́᷅́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́̂́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͥ́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́́͗́ͅͅͅͅͅͅͅͅ? :)
(note: appearance of above may depend on browser)
If anything is text, nothing is text.
There must be some libraries or something that filter Unicode...
Done -- as simple as it gets.
I'll definitely need to add support for that. Possibly annoying to strip that with utf8 involved. Any idea how many terminals support 0x9b?
For example this shows red on xfce4-terminal in UTF-8 mode:
printf "\xc2\x9b31mHi\e[0m\n"Of course your code is a library so you have the library author's prerogative to punt that problem to the users :)
I thought that this was what isprint() was for?