I have an output file (namely a log from screen) containing several control characters. Inside the screen, I have programs running that use control characters to refresh certain lines (examples would be top or anything printing progress bars).
I would like to output a tail of this file using PHP. If I simply read in that file and echo its contents (either using PHP functions or through calling tail, the output is messy and much more than these last lines as it also includes things that have been overwritten. If I instead run tail in the command line, it returns just what I want because the terminal evaluates the control characters.
So my question is: Is there a way to evaluate the control characters, getting the output that a terminal would show me, in a way that I could then use elsewhere (e.g., write to a file)?
@5gon12eder's answer got rid of some control characters (thanks for that!) but it did not handle the carriage return part that was even more important to me.
I figured out that I could just delete anything from the beginning of a line to the last carriage return inside that line and simply keep everything after that, so here is my sed command accomplishing that:
sed 's/^.*\r\([^\r]\+\)\r\?$/\1\r/g'
The output can then be further cleaned using @5gon12eder's answer:
cat screenlog.0 | sed 's/^.*\r\([^\r]\+\)\r\?$/\1\r/g' | sed 's,\x1B\[[0-9?;]*[a-zA-Z],,g'
Combined, this looks exactly like I wanted.