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