sgrey:

It looks like typical ANSI escape codes for controlling terminals (setting colors, coordinates, etc.). Generally they start with an ESC (0x1b) character and end with an upper-case letter[1]. So you could simply remove all character sequences starting with ESC until the first upper-case character, like so:

use strict; 
use warnings; 

# The ugly bit of text from your post
my $text = <<EOTXT; 
<p>Simple code to connect and login to HP Procurve use(ing) Expect bel
+ow, generates following output to STDOUT and PATH/FILE</p><p>^[[2J^[[
+?7l^[[3;23r^[[?6l^[[24;27H^[[?25h^[[24;27H^[[?6l^[[1;24r^[[?7l^[[2J^[
+[24;27H^[[1;24r^[[24;27H^[[24;1HConnecting 
 to Tacacs server^[[?25h^[[24;1H^[[24;1H 
 
^[[?25h^[[24;1H^[[?25h^[[24;1H^[[24;1HUsername:  
^[[?25h^[[24;1H^[[?25h^[[24;11H^[[24;11H^[[?25h^[[24;11H^[[1;1H^[[?25l
+^[[24;11H^[[24;1H 
 
^[[?25h^[[24;11H</p> 
EOTXT 

# Remove all bits of text from an ESC character to the first uppercase
+ alphabetic 
$text =~ s/\x1b[^A-Z]+[A-Z]//g; 
 
print "Remaining text is '$text'\n";

[download]

When I run this, I get:

$ perl foobar.pl
Remaining text is '<p>Simple code to connect and login to HP Procurve 
+use(ing) Expect below, generates following output to STDOUT and PATH/
+FILE</p><p>Connecting
 to Tacacs server

Username: 


</p>
'

[download]

Notes

[1]: The wikipedia article I linked to says the end character is from ASCII 64 to 126 (@ to ~), so I'm clearly wrong here. But since the code gives me the desired (i.e., what I expected to see) results, so I'll just note the discrepancy here, rather than update the code.

[2]: Since the code above is a cut-and-paste from my screen, the escapes are turned into the sequence '^['. So you may want to add the line:

    $text =~ s/^[/\x1b/g;

just after setting the value if you want to download the above code & execute it.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

In reply to Re: Expecting non-print chars from HP Procurve by roboticus
in thread Expecting non-print chars from HP Procurve by sgrey

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