Parsing Net::Telnet Console Ouput

insensate has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've connected to a console server and issued commands to gather the information I need using Net::Telnet. However...the interface that formats fields for display in the console returns what looks like garbage from my perspective (the ? are leftward pointing arrows):

Enter?[C TN:?[1;25H   (or?[C press?[C RETURN?[C 
to?[C do?[C an?[C AD-HOC?[C Query)?[1;24H   ?[1;14H
[download]

Is this output familiar to anyone? If so...is there a module available to parse it? Or is there a way to more coherently recieve the data from the telnet server?
Thanks, Jason

Comment on Parsing Net::Telnet Console Ouput Download Code

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Re: Parsing Net::Telnet Console Ouput by jlongino (Parson) on Oct 08, 2002 at 21:51 UTC
What you're getting back is the raw data including terminal emulation escape sequences. To get plain text, telnet to the account and modify your $term setting. You may want something simple like "tty". Exactly how you set this environment variable will vary depending on what shell you use. E.g., on my Solaris 8 unix box (running tcsh, similar to csh), I would issue the command: `set term=tty` Note that if you do this (you might even want to change your shell initialization file permanently to reflect this) you may have to go back and twiddle with your expected prompt string. Also, instead of using terminal type "tty", you may want to set it to be the same or compatible with the telnet client you are using. --Jim	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Parsing Net::Telnet Console Ouput by insensate (Hermit) on Oct 21, 2002 at 19:00 UTC
Update: The telnet server application was an informix database and wouldn't support tty. I finally was able to craft the solution I wanted by passing the terminal output to HTML::FromANSI. A really slick module that parses the terminal data and escape sequences into HTML. `use HTML::FromANSI qw\|%Options ansi2html\|; $t=new Net::Telnet(Binmode=>1,Timeout =>20, Prompt=>'/\?/'); $t->dump_log("telnet.log"); $t->open("host"); $t->login("user","pword"); ###fetch terminal output here...store in $output $t->close(); ###HTML::FromANSI portion $Options{fill_cols} = 1; #preserve spacing print "<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Results</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>". ansi2html("$output"). "</BODY></HTML>";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]


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