VT100 in Python

Mon Sep 14 09:43:11 EDT 2009

On 09:29 am, nick at craig-wood.com wrote:
>Wolfgang Rohdewald <wolfgang at rohdewald.de> wrote:
>> On Sunday 13 September 2009, Nadav Chernin wrote:
>> > I'm writing program that read data from some instrument trough
>> > RS232. This instrument send data in VT100 format. I need only to
>> > extract the text without all other characters that describe how to
>> > represent data on the screen. Is there some library in python for
>> > converting VT100 strings?
>>>> that should be easy using regular expressions
>>At a basic level parsing VT100 is quite easy, so you can get rid of
>the VT100 control. They start with ESC, have other characters in the
>middle then end with a letter (upper or lowercase), so a regexp will
>make short work of them. Something like r"\x1B[^A-Za-z]*[A-Za-z]"
>>You might need to parse the VT100 stream as VT100 builds up a screen
>buffer though and the commands don't always come out in the order you
>might expect.
>>I think twisted has VT100 emulator, but I couldn't find it in a brief
>search just now.

Yep, though it's one of the parts of Twisted that only has API 
documentation and a few examples, no expository prose-style docs. If 
you're feeling brave, though:
http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/api/twisted.conch.insults.insults.ITerminalTransport.html
http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/api/twisted.conch.insults.insults.ITerminalProtocol.html
 http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/conch/documentation/examples/ (the 
insults section)
It's not really all that complicated, but without adequate docs it can 
still be tricky to figure things out. There's almost always someone on 
IRC (#twisted on freenode) to offer real-time help, though.
Jean-Paul