An unpainted cell exports as 0x00, which no terminal draws as nothing — it
comes out as tofu, as a stray glyph, or swallowed with the rest of the row
shifted left. One byte wide to fix, and this makes that one substitution and
no other: same length out, every escape sequence where it was.
The trap it exists to avoid is the obvious version of the job. An ANSI file's
last 128 bytes are a SAUCE record whose NULs are structure — binary fields and
the padding on the font name — so a tr over the whole file corrupts the
metadata and fixes no art at all. It cuts at the 0x1A that opens the record and
counts what it left alone. Both splashes are in exactly that state today: 24
NULs each, all of them SAUCE.
A space is only black if the span it lands in left the background black, so
the ones that would come out coloured are named by row and column rather than
quietly repainted — that is an editing call, not a substitution.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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