get text from the windows clipboard, or put text into clipboard from within batch files using sfk fromclip and toclip.

- download the free swiss file knife base from sourceforge.
- unpack the tool using winzip or unzip.
- open the Windows Command Line.

sfk toclip
 copy stdin to clipboard as plain text.
    type test.txt | sfk toclip
       copies the content of ASCII file test.txt into clipboard.
    sfk list | sfk toclip
       copies a file listing of the current dir into clipboard.

sfk fromclip [-wait] [-clear]
 dump plain text content from clipboard to terminal.
   -wait : block until plain text is available.
   -clear: empty the clipboard after reading it.

Example: turn backslashes into forward slashes.

Imagine you have the following text open within notepad:

   foo/bar/systems/alpha1.cpp
   foo/bar/systems/alpha2.cpp
   foo/bar/systems/beta1.cpp

and for some reason you need the first line in a format like this:

   foo\bar\systems\alpha1.cpp

then you may do it this way:

1. mark the first line using SHIFT + CURSOR keys.
2. press CTRL+C or CTRL+INSERT to copy it into clipboard
3. on the windows command line, run this command (e.g. from a batch):

   sfk fromclip +filter -rep x/x\x +toclip

4. back in the editor, press CTRL+V or SHIFT+INSERT,
   pasting the result from the clipboard.

As you see, the line changed into "foo\bar\systems\alpha1.cpp".

Example: reformat a spreadsheet line for further processing.

Imagine you have the following Excel file open:

   

and you need the data from line 3 as comma separated values.
Now, if you click left into line 3:

   

and press CTRL+C, the line is copied into clipboard, however as TAB-
separated data. (at least that's the behaviour seen with Excel.
Other packages like OpenOffice may behave different.)
So if you say on the command line:

   sfk fromclip

what you get is

   Foo Finance     4498542 1999    950     Dino

how do you turn this into comma-separated values?
we have 5 columns, therefore extend the above command like this
[type the following all in ONE line]:

   sfk fromclip +filter -spat -sep "\t" 
      -form "$col1;$col2;$col3;$col4;$col5"

which will result in this output:

   Foo Finance;4498542;1999;950;Dino

to make the data even safer for post-processing, we may surround
every value by quotes this way [type the following all in ONE line]:

   sfk fromclip +filter -spat -sep "\t" 
      -form "\"$col1\";\"$col2\";\"$col3\";\"$col4\";\"$col5\""

this is hard to type, of course, but if you place it into a .bat
file, you only have to type it once. this results in:

   "Foo Finance";"4498542";"1999";"950";"Dino"

As ever, the same result may be achieved in may ways.
For example, you may also save the whole spreadsheet data
as a comma-separated file, and then filter it by

   sfk filter export.csv "-+Foo Finance"

which should produce the same line.
 

read more about all sfk functions here.