If you send the man output to a file, you will see that the lines look something like:

D^HDE^HES^HSC^HCR^HRI^HIP^HPT^HTI^HIO^HON^HN
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You can either use a perl script to take them out, or us lazy/smart types use:

open(F,"man ssh| col -b |")
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People on old legacy unix boxes with crappy pagers have been using col -b for years to dump plain text to a file which can then be looked at with a text editor.