Re: When is a text file not a text file?

[Oliver Scholz]

sebyte <sdt133@netscape.net> writes:

>> What "tags" are these? I don't know the actual program you are
>> using. But I seem to recall that I once had a program "html2text" or
>> "htmltotxt" or whatever that procuced a text file as output
>> *containing ANSI escape sequences for colours*.

[...]
> Thanks for your time.  Here's an example of html2text's output,
> displayed in an Emacs buffer:
>
>
>   C^HCo^Hop^Hpy^Hyr^Hri^Hig^Hgh^Hht^Ht n^Hno^Hot^Hti^Hic^Hce^He:^H:
>   All reader-contributed material on freshmeat.net is the
[...]
> I had thought that they might be remnants of HTML tags, (I must admit
> I didn't look very closely), but I have found out since they are
> actually ANSI 'backspace control sequences', used to preserve things
> like underlining and boldface.  The html2text option '-nobs' gets rid
> of them.
[...]

Untested: You could also try to call

(ansi-color-apply-on-region (point-min) (point-max))

on a buffer containing such ANSI control sequences (after a `(require
'ansi-color)' that is).

    Oliver
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