Display escape sequences as text only - c++

Question

My program is outputting text which sometimes contains escape sequences such as "\x1B[J" (Clear screen). Is there anyway to suppress the escape sequence such that it doesn't perform its associated action but instead gets displayed via its text representation?
I would even be interested in doing this for \n and \r.

Answer 1

Escape the \ characters by changing each occurence to \\.
Note that these sequences work only, when you enter them in source code. Check the result of the following program:
#include <cstdio>
int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
char test[3] = { 0x5c, 0x6e, 0x00 }; // \n
char * test2 = "\\n"; // \n
printf("%s\n", test);
printf("%s\n", test2);
printf(test);
printf(test2);
return 0;
}

Answer 2

It's not clear at what level you want to intervene. If you're
writing the output, the simplest solution is just to not insert
the characters to begin with. If you're passing an
std::ostream to some library, and it's inserting the
characters, it's fairly simply to insert a filtering streambuf
into the output stream, and filter them out. Something like the
following should do the trick for the standard escape sequences:
class EscapeSequenceFilter
{
std::streambuf* myDest;
std::ostream* myOwner;
bool myIsInEscapeSequence;
protected:
int overflow( int ch )
{
int retval = ch == EOF ? ch : 0;
if ( myIsInEscapeSequence ) {
if ( isalpha( ch ) ) {
myIsInEscapeSequence = false;
} else if ( ch == 0x1B ) {
myIsInEscapeSequence = true;
} else {
retval = myDest->sputc( ch );
}
return retval;
}
public:
EscapeSequenceFilter( std::streambuf* dest )
: myDest( dest )
, myOwner( NULL )
, myIsInEscapeSequence( false )
{
}
EscapeSequenceFilter( std::ostream& dest )
: myDest( dest.rdbuf() )
, myOwner( &dest )
, myIsInEscapeSequence( false )
{
myOwner->rdbuf( this );
}
~EscapeSequenceFilter()
{
if ( myOwner != NULL ) {
myOwner->rdbuf( myDest );
}
}
};
Just declare an instance of this class with the output stream as
argument before calling the function you want to filter.
This class is easily extended to filter any other characters you
might wish.