A Python module and command-line utility for converting .ANS format ANSI art to HTML.

pip install ansipants

python -m ansipants input.ans > output.html

For additional options, run python -m ansipants --help.

The output is a fragment of HTML, in UTF-8 encoding, intended to be inserted into a preformatted text element (<pre>...</pre>). Further styling is up to you - for the proper MS-DOS experience, The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack by VileR is recommended.

Example code:

from ansipants import ANSIDecoder

with open('input.ans', 'rt', encoding='cp437') as f:
    decoder = ANSIDecoder(f)

print(decoder.as_html())

class ansipants.ANSIDecoder(stream=None, palette='vga', width=80, strict=False)

Parameters:

• stream - the ANSI input data as a file-like object. This should be opened for reading in text mode, which means you'll need to specify the appropriate encoding - for ANSI art created for DOS this will most likely be cp437.
• palette - the colour palette to use; either 'vga' or 'workbench'
• width - the number of columns the text should wrap at
• strict - If True, the decoder will raise an ansipants.ANSIDecodeError exception on any unrecognised or malformed escape codes; if False, it will skip past them.

ANSIDecoder.as_html()

Returns the HTML output as a string.

ANSIDecoder.as_html_lines()

Returns the HTML output as an iterator, yielding one line at a time.

Matt Westcott matt@west.co.tt