How might I pass text data from the ruby console into my clipboard without saving to a file?
You can just echo it instead if there are no newline characters in the string; otherwise, use the IO
class.
Using echo
:
system "echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy"
OR
`echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy`
Ruby will then just rip the text from memory, inject it into the shell command which opens a pipe between the echo
and pbcopy
processes.
Using the IO
class:
If you want to do it the Ruby way, we simply create a pipe with pbcopy
using the IO class. This creates a shared files between the processes which we write to, and pbcopy
will read from.
IO.popen("pbcopy", "w") { |pipe| pipe.puts "Hello world!" }
Here's a simple one-line method you can paste into your IRB console:
def pbcopy(arg); IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w') { |io| io.puts arg }; end
Once it's defined you can simply do
pbcopy stringdata
or copy the result of the last command with
pbcopy _
Of course, you can also put the method definition in an initializer or something, such as .irbrc
or .pryrc
if you use pry. Here's a prettier and slightly more intelligent version:
def pbcopy(arg) out = arg.is_a?(String) ? arg : arg.inspect IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w') { |io| io.puts out } puts out trueend
You can use my clipboard gem for a Ruby-API to the system clipboard (which is also platform independet, on macOS it will use the same pbcopy
utility under the hood), so that you can use it from IRB:
require 'clipboard'Clipboard.copy(stringdata);p
Usually, the copy
method returns the string which was copied. This the reason for the ;p
bit: It is a trick to return nil
so that the console would not display the actual string data.