[Rubycocoa-talk] putting arbitrary strings on the clipboard

[Brian M. <ma...@ex...>]

I want to put arbitrary ASCII strings onto the clipboard (including  
NULs, control chars, etc.). I could do this:

def copy(string)
   applescript = "set the clipboard to \"#{string}\""
   OSX.do_osascript(applescript)
   true
end

But I see no way in applescript to quote peculiar characters (other  
than tab and newline). As a hack, I can convert the string into  
UTF-8, then back into a string, and paste that:

def to_hex(string)
   string.unpack('c*').collect { | char | sprintf("%x", char)}.join
end

def copy(string)
   applescript="
     set unicode_version to \xc7data utf8#{to_hex(string)}\xc8
     set the clipboard to unicode_version as string
   "
   OSX.do_osascript(applescript)
   true
end

(The funny quoted characters are the chevrons applescript uses to  
surround unprintable stuff.)

This happens to work even for Mac-Roman characters (those with the  
high-order bit set), though I think that's an unintended side-effect  
of the way "as string" works.

I'd rather go through a lower-level API than through applescript, but  
I'm ignorant enough of OSA and other topics specific to the Mac that  
I can't find what that would look like.

Can anyone help?

-----
Brian Marick, independent consultant
Mostly on agile methods with a testing slant
www.exampler.com, www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog
Book in progress: www.exampler.com/book