Guides/Clipboard
Access to the OS clipboard can be very useful when working with other programs.
General Usage Scenario
You want to copy data from excel or the web browser into J environment. There are a couple of sophisticated ways to move data, but sometimes you feel its too complicated to do a simple job. In that case,
1. You select the area you want to copy from excel or browser and copy it to clipboard, for exmaple by clicking ctrl-c in windows. 1. Read it into the J environment as a string 1. Transform it into the original tabular format using J boxes (usually the field seperator is TAB and row separator LF) 1. Convert the data format appropriately
The following example is ran on J6:
NB. Suppose you have selected the section you want to copy from an excel sheet and ctrl-c'ed NB. Read in the clipboard t=.wdclipread '' load 'format' NB. Transform it into the tabular form t=.clipunfmt t NB. Then you do conversion and etc on the data NB. After all the manipulation, you may want to write back to excel t=.clipfmt t wdclipwrite t NB. Then you go to excel and paste the clipboard by ctrl-v
J Version Specific Method
J6 and under
- Read: wdclipread ''
- Write: wdclipwrite 'string to paste'
J7 jgtk
- Read: clipread ''
- Write: clipwrite 'string to paste'
Since J7, the format script's location is changed and you have to : load '~addons/general/misc/format.ijs'
JHS
On windows, you may use Scripts/WindowsClipboard.
On the other platforms, ...
J8 jqt
- Read: wd 'clippaste'
- Write: wd 'clipcopy *','string to paste'
Contributed by June Kim