OSX perl2clipboard

I don't know if this is too parochial to be of greater interest, but it's a trick for getting perl to use the clipboard in Mac OSX which I've found very useful. It has the advantage over a temp file in that the resulting data is accessible to all apps. Basically by opening pipes to the pasteboard tools pbpaste and pbcopy, the clipboard seamlessly appears as file handles. See the typically useful-in-a-real-world-situation example script below - copy a word to the clipboard, run the script and it will place a backwards version on the clipboard to be pasted where ever. CAVEAT: Due to limitations with the current incarnations of pbpaste and pbcopy, this won't work with non ASCII data.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my($data,$word);
my(@letters);

open (FROM_CLIPBOARD, "pbpaste|");
open (TO_CLIPBOARD, "|pbcopy");

$data=<FROM_CLIPBOARD>;

if ($data){ $word=$data ;}
else { $word = "forwards"; }

@letters=split(//,$word);

print TO_CLIPBOARD reverse(@letters),"\n";

close (FROM_CLIPBOARD);
close (TO_CLIPBOARD);
[download]

The above is a trivial example, below I've included a script which incorporates this technique for polling http://thesaurus.reference.com for a word entry in Roget's Thesaurus, filtering (brutally I'll admit) out all the ads and pop ups associated.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w


#=========== declare includes =============

use strict;
use diagnostics-verbose;

#========== declare variables =============
my($URL,$content,$test,$word);

my(@content,@filtered);


#============= script body ================


open (FROM_CLIPBOARD, "pbpaste|");
open (TO_CLIPBOARD, "|pbcopy");


$test=<FROM_CLIPBOARD>;

$test ?    $word=$test : print "what word are you looking for?\t"; $wo
+rd=<>;


chomp($word);

$URL= "http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=$word&db=roget";

print "getting the data for the word \"",$word,"\"....\n";

use LWP::Simple;
unless (defined ($content = get $URL)) {
    die "could not get $URL\n";
}


print "filtering the data ....\n";

(undef,$content)=split (/<!-- Content -->/,$content);
($content,undef)=split (/<!-- End content -->/,$content);


@content= split (/<tr>/,$content);
for (@content){

next unless /<[^>]td*>/; 
next unless /:|,/;
next if /Source:|Entry/;
last if /Try your search for/;
s/&nbsp;//gs;
s/<[^>]*>//gs;

push (@filtered,$_,"\n");

}

print "directing output to clipboard...\n";

print TO_CLIPBOARD @filtered;

print "done.\n";

close(FROM_CLIPBOARD);
close(TO_CLIPBOARD);
[download]

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