We have a Lucent telephone switch which can be managed using a terminal or terminal emulator. I know the commands required to log in and access the directory (unfortunately these may vary depending on the state any previous manual session was left, but I can still get to where I want to be).

The directory is formatted for screen display using line drawing characters, Page Down for more etc.

I wrote a VB6 app which used a 3rd party listener and was able to stream the directory but I couldn't figure how to decode the VT-100, other than by looking at every character and deciding whether it was a horizontal or vertical line character, column padding, end of line etc.

I could get the text into tab delimited columns but it was extermely flaky. Import into a database was rarely good enough quality for the resulting text file to be linked by SQL Server with our HR database. Eventually I abandoned the project.

Given the power of the dot net framework, there must be a better way of doing this. I'm prepared to work out the details but I need a roadmap: best method of initiating the session, components to use, method for decoding the stream.

I am sure lots of people need to extract this kind of information from their telephone switches: the Ops-man software recommended by our telephone engineers is expensive and can unly be used via a GUI: although an export can be scheduled, it can't easily be customised.