in reply to Odd characters in Telnet prompt

As MidLifeXis already explained, it's a problem with ANSI escape sequences. The documentation of Net::Telnet describes the effect in section Connecting to a Remote MS-Windows Machine.

If you cannot disable the highlighting at the server side, cleaning up the response is advised. Maybe the following node allows you to save some effort: clean Telnet ANSI escape codes: VT52 and VT100