Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Sun, 22 Jan 2006

The right way to put Unicode on the pasteboard

The previous solution to my copy-Unicode problem turns out not to work for non-Unicode characters, at least not for the sort of screwy characters testers like to paste into apps. So I had to solve it right. I put the solution here in hopes that it'll be found in a web search someday and save someone some time.

require 'osx/cocoa' UTF8_ENCODING=4 #Example: unicopy %w{ 03b4 03d4 03a6 } def unicopy(hex_string_array)   copy_with_encoding(utf8(hex_string_array), UTF8_ENCODING)   true end # Utilities def utf8(hex_string_array)   number_array = hex_string_array.collect do | hex_name |     hex_name.to_i(16)   end   number_array.pack("U*") end def copy_with_encoding(string, encoding)   data = OSX::NSData.dataWithRubyString(string)   ns_string = OSX::NSString.alloc.initWithData(data, :encoding, encoding)   pb = OSX::NSPasteboard.generalPasteboard   pb.declareTypes(["NSStringPboardType"], :owner, nil)   pb.setString(ns_string, :forType, "NSStringPboardType") end

For the Windows version and for copying non-Unicode, look here: http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/review-copies/test-strings-0.1.zip. That's an alpha version of a collection of utility methods oriented toward helping testers mess with text fields. They're inspired by James Bach and Danny Faught's perlclip. They work on both the Mac and Windows. The source will eventually live on the Scripting for Testers site.

## Posted at 21:52 in category /ruby [permalink] [top]