The only way to do it that I can think of is using C1 requests and testing the return value:
$ echo `echo -en "\x9bc"`
^[[?1;2c
$ echo `echo -e "\x9b5n"`
^[[0n
$ echo `echo -e "\x9b6n"`
^[[39;1R
$ echo `echo -e "\x9b0x" `
^[[2;1;1;112;112;1;0x
The above ones are:
CSI c Primary DA; request Device Attributes
CSI 5 n DSR; Device Status Report
CSI 6 n CPR; Cursor Position Report
CSI 0 x DECREQTPARM; Request Terminal Parameters
The terminfo/termcap that ESR maintains (link) has a couple of these requests in user strings 7 and 9 (user7/u7, user9/u9):
# INTERPRETATION OF USER CAPABILITIES
#
# The System V Release 4 and XPG4 terminfo format defines ten string
# capabilities for use by applications, .... In this file, we use
# certain of these capabilities to describe functions which are not covered
# by terminfo. The mapping is as follows:
#
# u9 terminal enquire string (equiv. to ANSI/ECMA-48 DA)
# u8 terminal answerback description
# u7 cursor position request (equiv. to VT100/ANSI/ECMA-48 DSR 6)
# u6 cursor position report (equiv. to ANSI/ECMA-48 CPR)
#
# The terminal enquire string should elicit an answerback response
# from the terminal. Common values for will be ^E (on older ASCII
# terminals) or \E[c (on newer VT100/ANSI/ECMA-48-compatible terminals).
#
# The cursor position request () string should elicit a cursor position
# report. A typical value (for VT100 terminals) is \E[6n.
#
# The terminal answerback description (u8) must consist of an expected
# answerback string. The string may contain the following scanf(3)-like
# escapes:
#
# %c Accept any character
# %[...] Accept any number of characters in the given set
#
# The cursor position report () string must contain two scanf(3)-style
# %d format elements. The first of these must correspond to the Y coordinate
# and the second to the %d. If the string contains the sequence %i, it is
# taken as an instruction to decrement each value after reading it (this is
# the inverse sense from the cup string). The typical CPR value is
# \E[%i%d;%dR (on VT100/ANSI/ECMA-48-compatible terminals).
#
# These capabilities are used by tac(1m), the terminfo action checker
# (distributed with ncurses 5.0).
Example:
$ echo `tput u7`
^[[39;1R
$ echo `tput u9`
^[[?1;2c
Of course, if you only want to prevent display corruption, you can use less approach, and let the user switch between displaying/not displaying control characters (-r and -R options in less). Also, if you know your output charset, ISO-8859 charsets have the C1 range reserved for control codes (so they have no printable chars in that range).
