AutoHotkey Community

ClipCleaner
ClipCleaner is a tiny utility program I wrote that "cleans" the contents of the clipboard by converting it to plain text. Of course this is only applicable to text-based contents, it would be useless to try and "clean" an image or other binary object on the clipboard.

When the program is run, it remains in memory with a small icon on the toolbar. After copying text to be cleaned, press Win + C (where Win is the Windows key) and the clipboard contents will be converted to text. This is really a very small script: one AutoHotKey command does all of the work. The rest of the file consists of comment lines and tray settings.

My primary uses for this are:

1. It is faster than using Paste Special in Microsoft Office applications when I am trying to paste only text.
2. If you need a list of filenames from an Explorer window, select the files and copy them to the clipboard. The file names are not available as ASCII text at this point, they are in a special format so that Windows can link to the files when you paste the names. But now if you WANT only the names, pressing Win+C will "clean" them up and convert them into their text equivalents (with full path names).

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

http://www.autohotkey.net/~DaTex/ClipCleaner/

DaTex

Change Log
Version 1.0 (Current Version, 8 September 2009)
Cleans text on clipboard.
Menu tray icon set to Shell32.dll number 145 (a checkmark on a file)
Set the menu tray tooltip to remind the user what key activates it

Hi DaTex,

Nice little script. I modified it a small bit





Regards,

Martin O'Neill

Martin,

What an obvious improvement - thank you. I can add the Win+V to the script so that you can "clean and paste" in one action, or "clean only" in case you want the clipboard text to be available to another script. I will update the script on the website.

DaTex

For users who also want the names of files (not full paths), you can trim lines on clipboard down to the last backslash with:

pajenn, thanks for sharing. Your method requires fewer variables and is simpler to use then the ahk SplitPath Function. Your code will go into my RegEx Library.

I encourage everyone to share their RegEx scripts as pajenn did here. Great scripts like his help to shorten ahk scripts and the development time of them.
And, we all benefit from that!

adding the following code will auto-clean the clipboard if it contains any text.



If it only contains a picture, the A_EventInfo will be 2. If it's a picture AND text, A_EventInfo will be 2.
Keeping that in mind, the original script can be enhanced with a simple if line:

see similar ideas here