How can I view the clipboard on a mac with all formatting applied? For example, if I copy-paste a table in Excel, not only does it copy the text, but it also copies formatting (I believe it copies it as an html object to the clipboard). How would I view this? The closest I have found is the Finder Clipboard or pbcopy but that seems to just show raw text, and no actual ancillary formatting. In other words, I want to view the literal data in my clipboard, not just the text that would be pasted into a plain text edit. How could this be done?
# this data should have formatting...
$ pbpaste
2019 Q1
2018 Q1
Related
I'm working in a chords transposing app, It has an editor view for the user to paste the lyrics and chords. The problem is that when I hold tap in the entry view to paste the text, in some devices the lyric and chords appear in the same line, It seems It doesn't recognize the "\n" char in some lines from the web text. I've tried to use the clipboard like this:
if (Clipboard.HasText)
{
var textFromWeb = await Clipboard.GetTextAsync();
txtSongEntry.Text = textFromWeb;
}
It works, but like the first way, just works for some devices.
I've also tried to convert the clipboard text to utf8 but I get the same result.
In some devices there is a function called "paste as unformatted text", If I use this instead of simple paste It works perfect.
Is there any way to clean the clipboard text format before paste it on the editor?
All ideas/suggestion are welcome.
If I'm not clear let me know, English is not my native language :(
I would like to be able to get a list of all the hyperlinked URLs in any formatted text that I select on the Mac (formatted text such as a web page or a word processor document).
Preferably I'd like use Applescript or Automator to extract this list of hyperlinks from the text (so that I can then use Applescript to perform further processing on these URLs).
Note that I am talking about hyperlinks being extracted from formatted text, not just extracting URLs from text containing plaintext URLs.
This hyperlink extraction from formatted text seems like it should be a simple programming task, but I have been struggling to find a way to do this in either Applescript or Automator.
Automator can be set to accept rich text input from a text selection, or can input rich text from the clipboard, but I cannot find any way to access this rich text as a string within Automator or Applescript, such that I can then extract the hyperlinked URLs from the string of rich text data.
Once I get access to the rich text data as a string, there will be no problem in extracting the URLs.
Any suggestions on how I might solve this issue are gratefully received.
Applescript itself does not unpack embedded text, so you'll have to use a helper app one way or another. You can use do shell script 'textutil' to do some unimbedding of links:
perl -ne 'print chr foreach unpack("C*",pack("H*",substr($_,11,-3)))' |
textutil -stdin -stdout -convert html -format rtf
Then, you'll have to extract the URLs. I would suggest using the Automator action 'Extract Data' to do this. If you set the whole thing up as an Automator Workflow, you could invoke it from Applescript. Or, if you save it as a Service, you can just run the whole thing from the Service.
Here's a screenshot of that method that should show what you need:
Let me know if you have questions. You can see variations on this technique here.
Update:
If you want to create this into a Service, it is difficult to coerce the built-in input from Automator into RTF. An effective method is to ignore the input and do a
keystroke "c" using command down
to copy the selected text to the clipboard and then use the workflow from there. See example:
When I copy something and paste it from buffer in TextEdit, it saves text formatting (font-color, background-color, font-style) How can I turn that off?
I don't think you will be able to turn it off. But you can tweak it in the copy/paste process.
Take a look at this article here as it explains how you can copy/paste using a certain combination of keys to skip formatting.
Paste the copied text and match current style by using Command+Option+Shift+V.
Notice the difference from the normal Command+V paste trick, which would include the formatting.
If you don't want to save text with formatting, you should work with plain text format: menu Format > Make Plain Text (⇧⌘T). You can also set plain text format as your default document format in TextEdit Preferences.
My question is related to this topic How to copy and paste code without rich text formatting? except its from the opposite viewpoint: I'm creating a document from PowerPoint in which I have code snippets in text boxes. I want to make the document as simple as possible by making the code snippet text boxes easy to copy and paste the code into a terminal to run without editing anything. However, the way I have it right now is that when I copy and paste it keeps the formatting and I have to go though letter by letter to erase the end of line symbols. How should I format this in PowerPoint?
You can get rid of most formatting by copy/pasting from PPT to Notepad and then copy/pasting from there to your terminal program, or if the latter has a Paste Special command, you should be able to paste as plain text, which'd get rid of formatting.
Line/Paragraph breaks are another matter. If the end of line symbols are the only formatting problem when you've pasted the text into a terminal (emulator program, I assume), it sounds as though the terminal's using CR or LF as a line ending, whereas PPT's using CR/LF pairs. It might only be necessary to reconfigure the terminal software to use CR/LF.
It's worth a look at this page on my site, where I explain what line and paragraph ending characters are used by different versions of PowerPoint in different situations.
Paragraph endings and line breaks
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00992_Paragraph_endings_and_line_breaks.htm
Sorry, my mistake was not realizing that PowerPoint auto formats hyphens and quotation marks to make them stylized, and the terminal was not recognizing the symbols. All I did was type in a quotation mark/hyphen then copying that before I pressed the space bar after it to save the original formatting.
We work with bugzilla. Whenever you need to query a ticket you just need to know the bugid (integer) and you simply prepend this to it.
http://<bugzilla_server>/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=<bug_id>
Suppose I have a bug link which looks like this 777. If I select and copy this it is preserved on the pasteboard so when I paste this into mail it will correctly preserve the link and it's attributes.
What I am looking for is to simple type '777' select it and run an applescript on it and replace it with a link like the one above. Can anyone help me out??
The following AppleScript will take the contents of the clipboard and replace it with the URL prepended:
set the clipboard to "http://bugzilla_server/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=" & (the clipboard)
You can compile that to an AppleScript scpt and make it available in a Scripts folder or compile it to a launchable app:
osacompile -e 'set the clipboard to "http://bugzilla_server/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=" & (the clipboard)' -o replacebug.scpt # or -o replacebug.app
If your primary use case for this is in composing mail in Mail.app, this may not be the most user-friendly approach, though. If you are using Snow Leopard (10.6), a simpler solution is to take advantage of the new Text Substitution feature. Open the System Preferences -> Language & Text preference panel, select the Text tab, and click + to add a new substitution, perhaps:
Replace With
(b) http://bugzilla_server/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=
Then, in Mail.app, start a New Message and, with the cursor clicked within the text body, do a Control click of the mouse to bring up the contextual menu. From it, select Substitutions -> Text Replacement. From now on, as you are typing in the text body of the email when you type:
(b)777
the (b) will automatically change to the URL text you saved:
http://bugzilla_server/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=777
This will also work in other Cocoa text-enabled applications like Safari.
EDIT:
When talking about composing URL links in email, there are at least three different formats of email, each with a different solution. Since you don't say which kind you are using, I'll cover all three:
Plain text format - There's no way to "hide" the URL in the composed email although some email readers might present a clickable link for a plain-text URL.
HTML-formatted email - Apple's Mail.app does not support composing email in this format although it will display it. Using some other mail writer client or your own program, it's easy enough to compose a link using a standard HTML anchor <a href=...> tag.
Rich Text Format email - AFAIK, this is the only way to compose a URL link with Mail.app. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an easy way to directly create an RTF hyperlink using AppleScript commands. Based on a suggestion here, this is a way to do it by creating a modifiable RTF template via the clipboard.
In TextEdit.app, create a new Document window.
Insert the text you want to appear in the email, i.e. 777.
Select the text (⌘A) then add a link (⌘K). Enter the full URL also with 777 into the "Link destination" field; click OK.
Modify the text format as desired with Format menu commands.
Save the file (⇧⌘S) as temp.rtf with File Format -> Rich Text Format.
Close the document window.
Open a document window (⌘O) selecting file temp.rtf and selecting Ignore rich text commands.
Insert the following before the first line in the file:
#!/bin/sh
sed -e "s/777/$(pbpaste -Prefer txt)/g" <<EOF | pbcopy -Prefer rtf
Append EOF as a separate line at the end of the file.
It should now look something like this:
#!/bin/sh
sed -e "s/777/$(pbpaste -Prefer txt)/g" <<EOF | pbcopy -Prefer rtf
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf250
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
{\field{\*\fldinst{HYPERLINK "http://bugzilla_server/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=777"}}{\fldrslt
\f0\fs24 \cf0 777}}}
EOF
Save this as a Plain Text file and execute directly as a shell script or call it via the AppleScript do shell script command.
This kind of solution will work with most other applications that support Rich Text format.
Not sure exactly the function you're looking for, but this will take a number from your clipboard and process it into a link and put the link on the clipboard as a standard href URL that will work in plain or rich text, like:
Bug number 777 link
Change <bugzilla_server> to your working URL.
set bug_number to the clipboard
set the_text to "Bug number " & bug_number & " link"
set the clipboard to the_text