Firstly, there's probably a better way to do whatever you're trying to do w.r.t cd/dvd burning. I'm not familiar with gear, but its webpage lists "Batch file scripting capability" as a feature, which suggests that you might be able to do what you want without parsing output intended for humans. There are also a multitude of command-line cd and dvd utilities for Linux which might be better for scripting.
That said, it shouldn't be too hard to craft a regular expression that matches ANSI control sequences. Using http://www.dee.ufcg.edu.br/~rrbrandt/tools/ansi.html as a reference, here's how to do this for the first few control sequences... esc = '\x1B' start_control_sequence = esc + '[' Pn = r'\d+' # Numeric parameter Ps = '%s(;%s)*' % (Pn,Pn) # Selective parameter PL = Pn Pc = Pn control_sequences = [ PL + ';' + Pc + '[Hf]', # Cursor position Pn + '[ABCD]', # Cursor up|down|forward|backward 's', # Save cursor position 'u', # Restore cursor position '2J', # Erase display 'K', # Erase line Ps + 'm', # Set graphics mode '=' + Pn + '[hl]', # Set|Reset mode # ... etc ] match_ansi = re.compile(start_control_sequence + '(' + '|'.join(control_sequences) + ')') def strip_ansi(text): return match_ansi.sub('',text) (note: code is untested.. may contain typos) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
