Question

I’m writing a little python utility to help move our shell -help documentation to searchable webpages, but I hit a weird block :

output = subprocess.Popen([sys.argv[1], '--help'],stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
output = output.split('\n')
print output[4]
#NAME
for l in output[4]:
    print l
#N
#A
#
#A
#M
#
#M
#E
#
#E

#or when written, n?na?am?me?e

It does this for any heading/subheading in the documentation, which makes it near unusable.

Any tips on getting correct formatting? Where did I screw up?

Thanks

Answer 1

The documentation contains overstruck characters done in the ancient line-printer way: print each character, followed by a backspace (\b aka \x08), followed by the same character again. So “NAME” becomes "N\bNA\bAM\bME\bE". If you can convince the program not to output that way, it would be the best; otherwise, you can clean it up with something like output = re.sub(r'\x08.', '', output)