Using popen, but text looks weird - Python

Question

Hi folks,

I'm using os.popen() in order to run a few commands.

This is what "man ls" looks like:

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Any ideas why the text is displayed as such. I tried both Arial and Consolas fonts.

Help would be amazing! Thanks

Answer 1

Those are backspace characters: man is trying to backspace and reprint characters to get bolding, or underscores plus backspaces to get underlining.

The man man page says:

To get a plain text version of a man page, without backspaces and underscores, try

# man foo | col -b > foo.mantxt

You could also do a simple post-processing in Python:

s = re.sub(".\x08", "", s)

This removes any pair of characters where the second character is a backspace.