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adams3624564
adams3624564
Inspiring
May 8, 2020
Answered

Copy multi-line strings to the clipboard on windows

  • May 8, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 3129 views

I've been using the following to copy text to the clipboard, but it doesn't handle the new-line character ('\n').  I've tried different combinations of escape characters but haven't found anything that works.

 

 

if (isWindows()) {
    cmd = 'cmd.exe /c cmd.exe /c "echo ' + content + '| clip"';
}
system.callSystem(cmd);

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer adams3624564

Thanks everyone for the good ideas!  I ended up going with Mylenium's temp file suggestion, but I'm sure the other solutions would just as well.  Here is my finished code - all this for simply copying text to the clipboard geez:

        if (isWindows()) {
            var tempPath = Folder.temp.toString() + "\\cbtemp.txt";
            var tempFile = new File(tempPath);
            tempFile.encoding = "UTF8";
            tempFile.open("w");
            if (tempFile.error != "")
                return errTxt + tempFile.error;
            tempFile.write(content);
            if (tempFile.error != "")
                return errTxt + tempFile.error;
            tempFile.close();
            cmd = 'cmd.exe /c cmd.exe /c "type ' + tempFile.fsName + '| clip"';
        }

 

3 replies

A
Anonymous
May 8, 2020

There is a way, but I wouldn't really recommend it:

you can replace "\n" in your string with "& echo.", then put parantheses around everything up to the pipe.

So if you want to output "hello\nworld", you would not do it like this:

cmd.exe /c "echo hello\nworld|clip"

But rather like this:

cmd.exe /c "(echo hello& echo.world)|clip"

But probably piping into a file is a better approach.

    adams3624564
    adams3624564Author
    Inspiring
    May 9, 2020

    Thanks!  I'd seen examples of this arounnd the internet but didn't understand it until you explained it.  This is interesting.  I wish I knew more about the windows command line.  I'm going to keep this in mind for future projects.

    Adirai Maji
    Adirai Maji
    Inspiring
    May 8, 2020

    You can try utilize powershell for this,

     

    var content = "Let say this is your content with spaces and  \n new line goes here \n and another line goes here";

//Check your content.
alert(content);


//Replace all the spaces in your content to the format Powershell Can Understand.
content = content.replace(/ /g,"$([char]0x0020)");

//Replace all the new lines in your content to the format Powershell Can Understand.
content = content.replace(/\n/g,"$([char]0x000a)");

	var isWindows = $.os.indexOf('Windows') !== -1;
    
	if (isWindows) {
        var cmd = 'cmd.exe /c powershell.exe Set-Clipboard '+'"'+content+'"';
	}
	system.callSystem(cmd);

     

    Hope this will help.

      adams3624564
      adams3624564Author
      Inspiring
      May 9, 2020

      Thanks!  This seems like a good solution.  I ended up going with the temp file solution but I'm going to keep this in mind for furture projects.

      Mylenium
      Mylenium
      Brainiac
      May 8, 2020

      Honestly, I don't think this will ever work. You probably need some weird regex ur sub-command loop in your command line string to encapsulate all characters to convert back and forth. The command line itself is essentially not designed to handle multiline text. It would probably more efficient to write your data to a file and retrieve it from there.

       

      Mylenium

        adams3624564
        adams3624564Author
        Inspiring
        May 8, 2020

        I need the data to end up in the clipboard, but your suggestion to save to a file is good.  I can probably pipe the contents of the file to the clipboard.

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