How to use less in a script without getting ESC escape characters?

When I use less at the command line the output is like

but when I use less from within a bash script I get:

How can I use less in a bash script and not get all the escape characters and have it work like it does at the interactive command line?

Answers:

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Method 1

Use -R flag:

-r or –raw-control-chars

Causes “raw” control characters to be displayed. The default is to
display control characters using the caret notation; for example, a
control-A (octal 001) is displayed as “^A”. Warning: when the -r
option is used, less cannot keep track of the actual appearance of the
screen (since this depends on how the screen responds to each type
of control character). Thus, various display problems may result,
such as long lines being split in the wrong place.

-R or –RAW-CONTROL-CHARS

Like -r, but only ANSI “color” escape sequences are output in “raw”
form. Unlike -r, the screen appearance is maintained correctly in
most cases. ANSI “color” escape sequences are sequences of the form:

           ESC [ ... m

where the “…” is zero or more color specification characters For the
purpose of keeping track of screen appearance, ANSI color escape
sequences are assumed to not move the cursor. You can make less
think that characters other than “m” can end ANSI color escape
sequences by setting the environment variable LESSANSIENDCHARS to the
list of characters which can end a color escape sequence. And you can
make less think that characters other than the standard ones may
appear between the ESC and the m by setting the environment variable
LESSANSIMIDCHARS to the list of characters which can appear.

From less man page.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0