Re: Proposed Mac::Pasteboard

On Jan 21, 9:04 am, cl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Claes Jakobsson) wrote:
> Hi,

Hi. My apologies for taking so long to get back to you. After fiddling
with going through my ISP and not having anything show up in the
newsgroup (the original post was mailed to macosx@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
), I decided
to try Google Groups.

> I assume with pasteboard you mean the clipboard?

Well, I include the clipboard, which isn't quite the same thing. Mac
OS X allows multiple pasteboards, one of which is the system clipboard
(a.k.a. 'com.apple.pasteboard.clipboard'). You can create your own,
which go away when the last accessor does.

Each pasteboard can contain multiple items, and each item multiple
"flavors" (Apple's technical term) of data. Yes, I expect most users
to be popping text on and off the system clipboard, but there's more
to it than that.

> There seems to be an attempt of a generic cliboard interface on CPAN
(http://search.cpan.org/dist/Clipboard/
> ) which according to the readme says it works on OS X. I suppose it
> just uses the 'pbcopy' and 'pbpaste' command line tools.
>

Yes, it just shells out to pbcopy and pbpaste, which means you can
only access plain text -- specifically, flavor 'com.apple.traditional-
mac-plain-text'. I was planning to access any flavor of data, though
the only testing I have done other than with text is to copy a graphic
to the clipboard with Graphic Converter, pull it back off with my
code, open the output file, and see if it looked like the same
picture.

Tom Wyant