Q&A - How can I filter out command charachters with vector transforms?

[solarisfire]

Question

Some of my kubernetes pods install a few packages with python pip as they spin up.

pip spawns a bunch of spinner/loading bar junk and a new empty line seems to be sent to the sink for every update to the length of the loading bar, example:

2025-07-10 15:47:09.659	

readline-8.2         | 357 KB    | ########## | 100% �[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A�[A

Is there a simple transform I can do to just drop all of these characters?

Vector Config

I've been trying stuff like:

if !exists(.message) || .message == "" || match(.message, r"^[\x1B\[\]A-Za-z0-9;|#%= \-]{0,10}\x1B\[A.*") || match(.message, r"^\s*[#=\-~|]+\s*$") { abort }

.message = replace(.message, r"\x1B\[[0-9;]*[A-Za-z]", "", "g")

._msg = .message
parsed = parse_json(.message) ?? {}
. = merge!(., parsed)
del(.message)

Vector Logs

unexpected error: invalid escape character: \x

[solarisfire]

Does nobody have any ideas for this??

[thomasqueirozb]

Your question is very similar to #23293

But instead of \u0000 you would use \u001B

.message = replace!(.message, r'\u001B', "")

Also remember to format your messages with ```, this vastly improves readability :)

[solarisfire]

Fantastic, I'll try that! Thank you!