Plain text (HTML) to Formatted (HTML) Text for clipboard

[Mikeman27294]

Hello everyone.

At the moment, I am writing a program for which I want to be able to copy plain text (with HTML formatting) and turn it into formatted text (like the result you would get if you copied the formatted text rather than the HTML code). I hope that makes sense.

Has anybody ever attempted this before / is this possible without having to paste it into a browser or text box or anything, just make calculations and place it back on the clipboard?

Thanks.

[Xenobiologist]

You write normal text like this post and then what?

[Mikeman27294]

What do you mean?

[jaberwacky]

The bigger question is what do you mean?

Edited January 11, 2012 by LaCastiglione

[guinness]

As I've interpreted it he wants to take:

Some text

and change this into

<span>Some test</span>

Or then again perhaps he wants to strip tags? Edited January 11, 2012 by guinness

[Mikeman27294]

Ok, fair enough, I thought it might be a bit confusing.

Well I am writing a program for which I want it to look at an HTML file, and extract a specified DIV. This I have done, and it works fine. It then cleans the code and changes the typeface of all of the text. This I have been able to do aswell. What I want to do now, is because I have the HTML, I want to be able to paste it into the clipboard, as if I had copied the text off a page, not the HTML. So basically, like I wrote the HTML to a file, opened it and copied the text from inside my browser to my clipboard. The text just copied to the clipboard would be formatted text, not plain text with HTML in it (I hope this is making sense). Does anybody know how to do this?

What I want to do is get this text from the clipboard:

<b>TEXT</b>

And place this text on:

TEXT

So basically, take the HTML off the clipboard and replace it with the text that the browser would show you based on that HTML.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Mikeman27294

[Xenobiologist]

So, you want to strip all html tags?

$sOrig = '</biv>-official sites</div>Overview-taglines</div>-trailers</div>-posters</div>'
;~ $sResult = StringRegExpReplace($sOrig, '(?<=>).*?(?=<)', '')
$sResult = StringRegExpReplace($sOrig, '<.*?>', '')
ConsoleWrite($sResult & @CRLF)

[guinness]

You're going to have to create your own HTML parser if you want to convert <strong>Bold</strong> to Bold. Or have a look at the IE functions.

Edited January 11, 2012 by guinness

[Mikeman27294]

No, I can already strip tags. I want to change it to rich text.

But I will take a look at the IE functions then, thanks.

[Xenobiologist]

Now, I've understood your task :-)

A ) Write your own parser and show output in Edit(RichEdit)

B ) embed an IE and let the browser do the work it already is able to.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Xenobiologist

[Mikeman27294]

No, I dont want to embed a browser, and I would rather not write my own parser.

Think about it like this then. Say you have this in a webpage:

<b>Hello World</b>

The browser changes it to this:

Hello World

I want to have Hello World on my clipboard, not <b>Hello World</b>

Edited January 11, 2012 by Mikeman27294

[jaberwacky]

How many tags are you planning on dealing with?

[Mikeman27294]

Just the following:

<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 20px; font-family: arial; color: #3333ff;"><strong>Title</strong></span><br /></div>
<span style="font-size: 12px; font-family: arial;">Description<br /><br />
<strong>Product Features</strong>
<ul>
<li>Product Attribute</li>
<li>Another Product Attribute</li>
</ul>
<strong>Product Contents</strong>
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>
Product Warranty</span>

That is the general layout of what I would like to convert from HTML to rich text. Ofcourse, for each product the text will be different but it will have all the same product tags.

Also, I used <br /> twice because on the hosting website, the whitespace for a paragraph break is exactly 0 so anything in a paragraph break appears on the same line as the previous text, so 2 line breaks are used. Also, the amount of product attributes and items included in the product change, and sometimes, I may also have second and rarely even 3rd level listed items:

<ul>
    <li>Product Sizes:</li>
    <ul>
        <li>Small</li>
        <ul>
            <li>Very Small</li>
            <li>Just Small</li>
        </ul>
        <li>Medium</li>
        <li>Large</li>
    </ul>
    <li>More Product Attributes</li>
</ul>

Edited January 11, 2012 by Mikeman27294

[tcurran]

I realize this is an old, dead thread, but in case anyone comes searching here, I believe this is what MikeMan27294 was looking for:

_ClipPutHTML https://sites.google.com/site/ascend4ntscode/clipputhtml

Edited January 4, 2013 by tcurran