Very odd output from subprocess

[m]

On Jul 1, 12:42 am, Nobody <nob... at nowhere.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:12:12 -0700, m wrote:
> > If I add the line:
> >      for l in line: print ord(l),'\t',l
> > after the first readline, I get the following:
>
> > 27          
> > 91         [
> > 48         0
> > 48         0
> > 109        m
> > 27          
> > 91         [
> > 51         3
> > 55         7
> > 109        m
>
> > before the codes begin for the string as it appears if I just print
> > it.  So, what is this sequence?  They seem like some sort of escape
> > codes, I've never seen this before at all.
>
> <ESC>[00m is the ANSI code to reset attributes to their default state.
> <ESC>[37m is the ANSI code to set the foreground color to white.
>
> > Can anyone enlighten me as to what is going on?
>
> > And, can I safely strip sets of 5 characters from the front as long as
> > they start with Escape (27)?
>
> No, escape sequences can be of arbitrary length.
>

It turned out that make was aliased to colourmake, and the escape
codes were being
put in there for beautifying the console output.  Sorry to bother
everyone.