Fix ANSI control characters before PowerShell output to a file - powershell

Question

Is there anyway for PowerShell to output a file without ANSI control characters like color control, e.x. [1;xxm or [xm], before outputting to a file,
[1;35mStarting selenium server... [0m[1;35mstarted - PID: [0m 22860
[0;36m[Signin Test] Test Suite[0m
[0;35m================================[0m
Running: [0;32mstep 1 - launch the browser[0m
[1;35m[40mINFO[0m [1;36mRequest: POST /wd/hub/session[0m
The output displays correctly with color in PowerShell terminal, (I've used chcp, not working)

Answer 1

You could try something like this:
... | ForEach-Object {
$_ -replace '\[\d+(;\d+)?m' | Add-Content 'C:\path\to\output.txt'
$_
}
or wrap it in a function:
function Tee-ObjectNoColor {
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(Position=0, Mandatory=$true, ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
[string]$InputObject,
[Parameter(Position=1, Mandatory=$true)]
[string]$FilePath
)
Process {
$InputObject -replace '\[\d+(;\d+)?m' | Add-Content $FilePath
$InputObject
}
}
... | Tee-ObjectNoColor -FilePath 'C:\path\to\output.txt'

Answer 2

For the windows system one could use the Replace command available as a part of Powershell 3.0.The powershell makes use of regex expression that helps to replace the ANSI Color codes. (In case of UNIX one could use the sed command )
Using Regex
Below is the standard Regex for removing ANSI color codes (can be used in Linux and windows both)
'\x1b\[[0-9;]*m'
\x1b (or \x1B) is the escape special character
(sed does not support alternatives \e and \033)
\[ is the second character of the escape sequence
[0-9;]* is the color value(s) regex
m is the last character of the escape sequence
Final Command
I am here outputting the logs of docker to a log file.One could do the same for other commands
docker logs container | ForEach-Object { $_ -replace '\x1b\[[0-9;]*m','' }| Out-File -FilePath .\docker-logs.log
ForEach-Object refers to each object from the pipped stream and $_ refers to current object.
The above command will remove the special characters like [1;35m , [0m[1;3 and ^[[37mABC from the output stream.