When I use perldoc, I get many characters like this ESC[1m with many variants. This happens, for example, when I type
perldoc perldoc
to the Unix command line, making the output unreadable. I checked the output of perldoc perldoc by piping in Unix to a hexdump program, and it really is outputting Escape [ 1 m.

Could someone please tell me the name of this type of encoding, so I could check out what perldoc is trying to say to me?

I run MacOsX 10.6.8 and my version of perl is downloaded from Macports. perl --version gives:
perl 5, version 12, subversion 3 (v5.12.3) built for darwin-multi-2level.
Can I fix my perldoc problem a) in MacOsX b) in perl?

Is this a MacOsX problem or a perldoc problem?


In reply to strange output characters from perldoc by dbae

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