Python Telnet formatting?

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:51:08 -0200, <mentaltruckdriver at gmail.com> escribi�:

> Hi everyone:
>
> I posted here a couple days ago looking for some help creating a
> Telnet-based chat server. You guys pointed me to Twisted, which has
> solved most of my issues.
>
> However, what I want to do is analyze strings received for keywords
> such as 'listcmds' and have the server return something to the client.
> I know how to do that part, at least.
>
> The issue is, when I use clients like PuTTY, it returns a lot of what
> appears to be formatting (e.g. if I typed Hello, it would return "\xff
> \xfb\x1f\xff\
> xfb \xff\xfb\x18\xff\xfb'\xff\xfd\x01\xff\xfb\x03\xff\xfd\x03Hello".)

They are part of the telnet protocol; 0xFF (IAC=Interpret as Command)  
starts a two or three byte command sequence.
Weren't you using telnetlib? It's supposed to handle this transparently.

> How would I go about filtering this stuff out of the strings? The
> thing is too, if I use other Telnet programs like Microsoft Telnet,
> they don't have this formatting, so I want to be able to recognize if
> it does have this formatting and act based on if it does or if it
> doesn't.

Any client could send similar commands at the start of the session, or  
even later.

> Any help is appreciated, I know I'm probably asking too many questions
> already :)

It isn't too hard to filter them out, if you want to do it by hand. See  
the source for telnetlib, and the original Telnet specificacion, RFC 854  
http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=854 and RFC 855.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina