Capture a Julia output in the clipboard

General Usage
1

Hello,

Currently I don’t have a mouse and the pad of my laptop is really really bad: I can’t select some text.

But I need to copy-paste some Julia outputs. How can I capture the output of a function and write it in the clipboard?

In R I do clipr::write_clip(capture.output(myfunction())). Is there a capture.output function in Julia, and a package to write in the clipboard?

Otherwise I suppose this should be possible in a terminal (I’m using Linux), but how?

2

Have you tried Julia’s clipboard command?

  clipboard(x)


  Send a printed form of x to the operating system clipboard ("copy").

  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

  clipboard() -> AbstractString


  Return a string with the contents of the operating system clipboard ("paste").

You may need to install external clip commands in your OS for it to work.

3

Thanks. I get “clipboard not defined”.

4

Please paste the output of the command here.

What version of Julia you are using?

5

Ah no it works!!

It didn’t work when I ran my file with julia myfile.jl in a terminal.

Thanks!!

6

No problem! Please mark the thread as solved by choosing an answer if possible. That way people can come here and quickly jump to the answer they need.

7

Hmm… This is not the output I want actually.

I have a Vector{Vector{Float64}} named vertices. When I type vertices in Julia, this prints:

8-element Vector{Vector{Float64}}
 [4.0, -1.0, 3.0]
 ......

But when I do clipboard(vertices), what I get in the clipboard is the same as print(vertices), namely:

[[4.0, -1.0, 3.0], ......

Is there a way to get the first output in the clipboard?

8

There may be an easier way but this seems to work:

julia> function myclipboard(x)
           iob = IOBuffer()
           show(iob, MIME"text/plain"(), x)
           str = String(take!(iob))
           clipboard(str)
       end
myclipboard (generic function with 1 method)

julia> x = [rand(3) for _ in 1:10]
10-element Vector{Vector{Float64}}:
 [0.0006688071063627454, 0.32438290031630856, 0.8963609977463138]
 [0.07447459439615989, 0.10858832326591139, 0.21761763049060934]
 [0.9474289304279342, 0.17597397164449635, 0.4534076639611243]
 [0.4745593192888291, 0.6805225170543437, 0.8428815292562719]
 [0.8008939242075624, 0.8933863723806169, 0.25332293783855564]
 [0.9801185523169914, 0.9014589729035086, 0.2976324614235306]
 [0.075404589462707, 0.17769135609527553, 0.54928725746172]
 [0.27625669533731967, 0.7821048947678795, 0.1840168069047895]
 [0.7481177179768426, 0.13077867820640932, 0.7906552800286413]
 [0.4480463507156114, 0.5866234993545199, 0.7985719519088222]

julia> myclipboard(x)

julia> clipboard()
"10-element Vector{Vector{Float64}}:\n [0.0006688071063627454, 0.32438290031630856, 0.8963609977463138]\n [0.07447459439615989, 0.10858832326591139, 0.21761763049060934]\n [0.9474289304279342, 0.17597397164449635, 0.4534076639611243]\n [0.4745593192888291, 0.6805225170543437, 0.8428815292562719]\n [0.8008939242075624, 0.8933863723806169, 0.25332293783855564]\n [0.9801185523169914, 0.9014589729035086, 0.2976324614235306]\n [0.075404589462707, 0.17769135609527553, 0.54928725746172]\n [0.27625669533731967, 0.7821048947678795, 0.1840168069047895]\n [0.7481177179768426, 0.13077867820640932, 0.7906552800286413]\n [0.4480463507156114, 0.5866234993545199, 0.7985719519088222]"

julia> println(clipboard())
10-element Vector{Vector{Float64}}:
 [0.0006688071063627454, 0.32438290031630856, 0.8963609977463138]
 [0.07447459439615989, 0.10858832326591139, 0.21761763049060934]
 [0.9474289304279342, 0.17597397164449635, 0.4534076639611243]
 [0.4745593192888291, 0.6805225170543437, 0.8428815292562719]
 [0.8008939242075624, 0.8933863723806169, 0.25332293783855564]
 [0.9801185523169914, 0.9014589729035086, 0.2976324614235306]
 [0.075404589462707, 0.17769135609527553, 0.54928725746172]
 [0.27625669533731967, 0.7821048947678795, 0.1840168069047895]
 [0.7481177179768426, 0.13077867820640932, 0.7906552800286413]
 [0.4480463507156114, 0.5866234993545199, 0.7985719519088222]
9

Cool! Thanks.