send-string-to-terminal but hide output

Question

I'd like to send some commands to the terminal Emacs is running in, using send-string-to-terminal. However, some terminals don't support the command I have in mind.

When this is the case, the command is echoed after the cursor, temporarily overwriting the display, and causing graphical corruption:

Result of running M-:(send-string-to-terminal "\e[5 q") in xfce4-terminal

(Note that the text appears in the echo area by mere coincidence—if I had run the code using a keybinding in a different buffer, the output would be positioned after the cursor)

Obviously, this is not desirable. Is there a way to hide the output (or mask it by redrawing the display in that region) so the command can silently fail?

Answer 1

You may temporarily replace the message function, which does the actual job of displaying the string in the echo area :

(cl-letf (((symbol-function 'message) #'ignore))
  (send-string-to-terminal "\e[5 q"))

ignore takes an arbitrary number of arguments, does nothing and returns nil.

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EDIT

I misunderstood the question's meaning. It turns out, after looking a bit at the send-string-to-terminal function definition in Emacs' C source, there is no way to prevent it from echoing the supplied command.