rspec users - Dec 2009 - Color output in pagers

Hi.

Is it possible to get color text in less, more or other pagers while
piping the color output of Cucumber and RSpec? If it''s not possible is
there any other methods to work with the color text in a console without
permanent ?rewinding? the output back to the beginning?

Thanks.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

P. A. <lists at ruby-forum.com> on 2009-12-02 at
09:08:
> Is it possible to get color text in less, more or other pagers while
> piping the color output of Cucumber and RSpec?
Have a look at these options for `less`:
>From LESS(1) man page:
> -r or --raw-control-chars
> 
>       Causes "raw" control characters to be displayed.  The
default is to
>       display control characters using the caret notation; for example, a
>       control-A (octal 001) is displayed as "^A".  Warning: when
the -r
>       option is used, less cannot keep track of the actual appearance of
>       the screen (since this depends on how the screen responds to  each
>       type of control character).  Thus, various display problems may
>       result, such as long lines being split in the wrong place.
> 
> -R or --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
> 
>       Like  -r,  but  only ANSI "color" escape sequences are
output in
>       "raw" form.  Unlike -r, the screen appearance is maintained
correctly
>       in most cases. 
You can set default options for less to use via the LESS evironment variable.
As an example, here is the value of mine:

$ echo $LESS
-X -e -R

Cheers,

Paul

I''ve known about the -R option but it doesn''t work for me.

$ cucumber #=> color output
$ cucumber | less -R #=> monochrome

$ spec -c <path/to/spec> #=> color output
$ spec -c <path/to/spec> | less -R #=> monochrome

but

$ ls --color=always | less -R #=> color output

It seems that your system has addition preferences that enables you to 
pipe the color tags in output to less. Could you tell me how did you 
achive it?


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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I solve it by myself.

To enable piping color output in Cucumber it needs to run the cucumber 
command with the -c option.

$ cucumber -c | less #=> color output

To enable piping color output in RSpec it needs to set the RSPEC_COLOR 
environment variable to true.

$ export RSPEC_COLOR=true
$ spec path/to/spec | less #=> color output

However, if RSPEC_COLOR is set to true the output to a file will include 
color tags. To prevent it, it needs to unset RSPEC_COLOR.

$ unset RSPEC_COLOR
$ spec path/to/spec > file #=> no color tags

Cheers!
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

P. A. <lists at ruby-forum.com> on 2009-12-02 at
10:13:
> $ cucumber #=> color output
> $ cucumber | less -R #=> monochrome
Ah now I see what you''re saying.  We''re getting burned by this
line:

http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/blob/master/lib/cucumber/formatter/ansicolor.rb#L20
> Term::ANSIColor.coloring = false if !STDOUT.tty? and not
ENV.has_key?("AUTOTEST")
So, we can either feature request an override variable for this line, or
perhaps there is a way to trick a program that STDOUT is actually a tty...?

Paul