mjhjmtu

I have a ncurses dump (with for example screen recorder from GNU screen)
and I would like to convert it into text

(there are some conversations in it, some lists and other things, all text, but ncurses formatted, like there is a permanent status bar, a clock, etc. and I really don't want to change subject about which ncurses software I use and how to use that to generate text instead a generic solution ... I open this question be cause isn't only one software, there are few, screen recorder from GNU screen is only an example)

if I use less tool to see file it complain about being binary and then show a lot of garbage

if I use cat, I can see the text, but all pages at once, no way to slow it down or interact with it at all (if I add | less ... it will behave like not using cat at all)

same thing with grep, it will only show all lines at once, if it finds the string

so, any ideas ?

You can usually view such files (for some value of “view”) with less -fr: -f forces less to open the file even if it thinks it’s a binary, and -r tells it to pass control characters to the display as-is. Another approach is to display them in the terminal, slowed down so that you can keep track of what’s happening (this is more useful for viewing ANSI animations, but it might help in your case); you can use slowcat for this.

You might get more useful results by using ansi2txt or ansi2html from the colorized-logs tools.