Greetings fellow monks,

I'm in the process of building a few manuals for my department which are basically compilations of "stuff" from various sources in various formats. When scraping things with copy-n-paste from intranet pages, I was always annoyed at how the text when pasted somewhere would always have extra spaces, line breaks, and other general formatting badness.

Perl to the rescue. The little snippet below I shortcutted to my desktop, so whenever I'm entering "scrape-mode," I just double-click. Then all is well.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Win32::Clipboard;
my $clipboard = Win32::Clipboard();

print "Text auto-format-clean when copied to the clipboard is active.\
+n";
print "To exit, CNTL-C out of this window.\n";

while (1) {
    $clipboard->WaitForChange();
    my $text = $clipboard->GetText();

    $text =~ tr/\r\n/ /;
    while ($text =~ s/  / /g) {};
    $text =~ s/^ //;
    $text =~ s/ $//;

    $clipboard->Set($text);
}

exit;

[download]

Although this seems like a really simple thing (actually, I guess it is), this little script has saved me extremely large amounts of time already today.

God, I love Perl.

-gryphon
code('Perl') || die;

In reply to Auto text format cleanup via Win32::Clipboard by gryphon

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