How can I pipe to less or more?

[ccbcreg]

I create some rather large json files and would like to pass or pipe the output from pjson to programs like less or more. However, I am not getting the desired results, see example below. Could you suggest a way to do this?

This works great!:

echo test.js | pjson 

{
  "australia": {
    "iso": "AU", 
    "name": "Australia"
  }
}

I'd like to be able to pass the output from pjson to less or more like so:

echo test.js | pjson | less

{ESC[39;49;00m
  ESC[39;49;00mESC[34;01m"australia"ESC[39;49;00m:ESC[39;49;00m ESC[39;49;00m{ESC[39;49;00m
    ESC[39;49;00mESC[34;01m"iso"ESC[39;49;00m:ESC[39;49;00m ESC[39;49;00mESC[33m"AU"ESC[39;49;00m,ESC[39;49;00m ESC[39;49;00m
    ESC[39;49;00mESC[34;01m"name"ESC[39;49;00m:ESC[39;49;00m ESC[39;49;00mESC[33m"Australia"ESC[39;49;00m
  ESC[39;49;00m}ESC[39;49;00m
}ESC[39;49;00m

Any suggestions?

[igorgue]

I'm not sure how to handle piped output, it's definitely just printing the colors.

I'll investigate anyways, if somebody knows mention it here I could add it.

[mjtamlyn]

I think you'd probably need to do echo test.js | pjson --no-color | less (with the imaginary --no-color flag). Less isn't very bright when it comes to colors...

[igorgue]

Haha look at this guys:

curl https://github.com/igorgue.json | pjson | less -RSFX

So awesome!

I'd close the issue if I get a +1

[ccbcreg]

Works for me! Thank you Igor.

[julianeden]

Didn't work for me :( got the formatting but no color.

[igorgue]

@aerovistae Did a little bit of research and I'm not sure how to fix the issue. Does less prints in color?

Reopened the issue, to see what's up.

[winny-]

This might be of interest -- https://github.com/alghanmi/terminal_color_test -- pipe this through less, with the appropriate flags set -- -R, I think?

[igorgue]

@winny- interesting, wonder if there's an option in Pygments to do that, looking at the code here, looks to me I need to use the format function directly, I wonder if I upgrade Pygments it'll work out, anyways, I'll take a look later, here's the piece of the code I think is where I gonna have to do something else: https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/pygments-main/src/a287342ee7165f50fdd54e3500be48256222cff6/pygments/__init__.py?at=default#cl-79

[winny-]

@igorgue Oh, no. I only mentioned alghanmi/terminal_color_test to demonstrate an easy way to make sure color is working properly.

As mentioned earlier, color can be enabled via passing the -t flag to pjson in conjunction to the -R flag for less. Example:

[igorgue]

Ahh @winny- got it, thanks!