Question

I can setup a telnet connection in Perl no problems, and have just discovered Curses, and am wondering if I can use the two together to scrape the output from the telnet session.

I can view on a row, column basis the contents of STDOUT using the simple script below:

use Curses;
my $win = new Curses;
$win->addstr(10, 10, 'foo');
$win->refresh;
my $thischar=$win->inch(10,10);
print "Char $thischar\n";

And using the below I can open a telnet connection and send \ receive commands with no problem:

use net::telnet;
my $telnet = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 9999,);
$telnet->open($ipaddress) or die "telnet open failed\n";
$telnet->login($user,$pass);
my $output = $telnet->cmd("command string");

… But what I would really like to do is get the telnet response (which will include terminal control characters) and then search on a row \ column basis using curses. Does anyone know of a way I can connect the two together? It seems to me that curses can only operate on STDOUT

Answer 1

If you are interacting purely with plain-text commands and responses, you can use Expect to script that, otherwise, you can use Term::VT102, which lets you screen scrape (read specific parts of the screen, send text, handle events on scrolling, cursor movement, screen content changes, and others) applications using VT102 escape sequences for screen control (e.g., an application using the curses library).