[TF] Colour preservation in arguments

[wabasoft at yahoo.fr (Waba)]

Hi list,

I have encountered two problems about disappearing colours:


The first one concerns ANSI escapes and the -p option in /echo and
/substitute: the escape char (\033) is stripped off from the arguments
passed to these commands if the -p option is specified.

Example: let %line be a variable containing ANSI escapes (for example a
line sent by the server),
  /echo %line
will display it correctly in colours, while
  /echo -p %line
will have no colour attributes, and [xxm sequences where the colour
changes were.

It is fixed here: http://mumetools.sf.net/tf/tf-colours.diff


The second one concerns TF's internal colour format and argument passing:
internally, all commands accept plain strings (char*) instead of
"internally formatted" strings (aline*), while -a/-P colouring produces
alines. Thus, all text formatting added with -P or -a options is lost when
this text is passed as argument. For example,
  /echo $(/echo -aBCgreen foo)
will echo a plain 'foo' in place of a bold, green 'foo'.
(I hope I RTFSed it right, since my coding style is quite different from
Ken Key's one).

This causes me some problems to do the following: Let's say that Abc is
a dangerous character killing his own side (team). I want to notice him
so I do
  /def -Fp2 -mregexp -t"Abc" -P0BCred t1
Then I want to ease running after people so I replace movement messages:
  /def -mregexp -t" leaves east.$" -ag t2 = /echo - %PL leaves >> EAST >>
Now if the server sends me "Abc leaves east.", Abc won't be in bold red
anymore, since %PL will have lost the colouring made by t1.

I'm not willing to replace all char* types by aline* in the TF sources 
(especially since the second one is a structure, handled in a completely
different way). Is it any workaround that I could use ? I thought about 
adding raw ANSI escapes in t1, but it won't work in the case Abc appears
in a line coloured by the server:
  ^[[33mInfortunatePlayer narrates 'Abc same-sided me'^[[0m
would become after t1
  ^[[33mInfortunatePlayer narrates '^[[31;1mAbc^[[0m same-sided me'^[[0m
and remove the yellow (33) colouring of the "same-sided me'" part.

Thank you much,
Waba
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