Rendering ansi escape codes and output redirection

[JacekArdanowski]

Hi,
I was just wondering if it's possible not to print ANSI escape characters when console output is being redirected to a file.
I'm thinking about special option which will prevent writing ANSI with:
app.exe > output.txt

In case of ordinary markup text: it is fine, because we can check the property Console.IsOutputRedirected and decide whether to use standard Console.Out, AnsiConsole.Markup() or even strip the markup from string.
Although with AnsiConsole.Write(IRenderable) and output redirection, it is impossible to control this behaviour and output.txt will always have ANSI characters.

So my question is: is it possible to add a flag to AnsiConsole which won't produce any ANSI characters when output from console is being redirected? Thanks.

[patriksvensson]

@JacekArdanowski You can set AnsiConsole.Profile.Capabilities.Ansi to false to prevent ANSI/VT codes from being outputted.

[JacekArdanowski]

Thank you! I'm going to see if it helps.

[jhgbrt]

This seems to not work for tables, is there another way for that?

Test code (file based app):

#:package Spectre.Console@0.54.0
using Spectre.Console;

AnsiConsole.Profile.Capabilities.Ansi = false;

AnsiConsole.MarkupLine("[bold red]Hello[/], [green]World![/]");
AnsiConsole.MarkupLine("[underline blue]This is underlined blue text.[/]");

var table = new Table();
table.AddColumn("Name");
table.AddColumn("Age");
table.AddRow("Alice", "30");
table.AddRow("Bob", "25");
AnsiConsole.Write(table);

When running this in powershell with dotnet run .\test.cs, you get full Ansi output (which is ok), when redirecting to a file, the table borders are not replaced by ASCII equivalent characters:

ΓöîΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓö¼ΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÉ
Γöé Name Γöé Age Γöé
Γö£ΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓö╝ΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöñ
Γöé Alice Γöé 30 Γöé
Γöé Bob Γöé 25 Γöé
ΓööΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓö┤ΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓöÿ

[patriksvensson]

Seems like an encoding issue. Try changing the file encoding to whatever your terminal's encoding is.