Ruby Rspec outputs literal escape characters on windows

Question

Hi all, I'm following the ruby on rails tutorial: http://railstutorial.org/chapters/static-pages#top

I'm up to using rspec. Having installed the win32console gem, it outputs gibberish in the console, i assume it is outputting the ansi colour change codes:

>rspec spec/
?[31mF?[0m?[31mF?[0m

Finished in 0.34376 seconds
?[31m2 examples, 2 failures?[0m

1) PagesController GET 'home' should be successful
    Failure/Error: Unable to find C to read failed line
    ?[31mundefined method `get' for #<RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::Nested_1::Nested_1:0x22294e0>?[0m
?[90m    # ./spec/controllers/pages_controller_spec.rb:7:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'?[0m

2) PagesController GET 'contact' should be successful
    Failure/Error: Unable to find C to read failed line
    ?[31mundefined method `get' for #<RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::Nested_1::Nested_2:0x2173d28>?[0m
?[90m    # ./spec/controllers/pages_controller_spec.rb:14:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'?[0m

Any tips how to fix this?

Answer 1

Ansicon works a treat!

http://adoxa.110mb.com/ansicon/index.html

Download, extract it somewhere, and do:

ansicon -i

Then close/reopen the command prompt. Sweet!

Answer 2

There was a bug in beta releases of RSpec 2. If you upgrade to latest you should now see colors if you have win32console installed.

See this: http://github.com/rspec/rspec-core/issuesearch?state=closed&q=color#issue/143

Answer 3

Update:

Rspec is still very buggy with windows coloring, especially if you're trying to use it with Autotest and/or Spork.

If you are still seeing escape codes, a quick hack is to edit the following file (exact path will depend on your version of RSpec)

%RUBY_HOME%\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\rspec-core-2.0.1\bin\rspec

And add the following line

require 'win32console'