I needed to remove all fancy ANSI graphics and colors from the output of tree, and just print something that fit a plain text file. This did the trick:

tree -L 1 --noreport -S -n --charset=US-ASCII

E.g.:

bronto@brabham:/var/cfengine/git/common$ tree -L 1 --noreport -S -n --charset=US-ASCII
.
|-- controls
|-- libraries
|-- modules
|-- services
|-- sources
|-- templates
|-- tools
|-- unit
`-- update.cf