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Sunday, April 01, 2007

Firefox extensions

Feel free to leave comments here to leave me a message about "Copy Link Text".

posted by Brett at 6:50 PM

18 Comments:

  • Bug report:

    Looks like your extension is copying the text from the ALT property. Consistently reproduced.

    - the_real_goat

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Wednesday, 08 August, 2007  

  • Thanks for the bug report, the_real_goat .

    While that should often be a useful feature (if you are highlighting a link which only has an image inside of it, why not grab the alt value), I do see also that when a link contains both text and an image, it will only grab the alt text.

    This extension uses a standard means of grabbing the text of the current link, so I might report this as a bug to Firefox.

    I think I should also be able to get around this limitation by using another approach to get the text, but I've got an important project I have to concentrate on now, so I can't promise anything for now... But feel free to stay in touch to keep me on my toes with this one... :)

    best wishes, Brett

    By Blogger Brett, at Wednesday, 08 August, 2007  

  • Please update the extension so that the context menu item text is in Title Case (the standard for Firefox).

    By Blogger dragev, at Saturday, 01 September, 2007  

  • Thanks for the tip. I'm sent an update to the addons site as far as the change in case.

    By Blogger Brett, at Saturday, 01 September, 2007  

  • I had seen an extension earlier which added other items to the context menu, so I had thought mine was simpler. But yes, the one you provided now looks like it is better in every way. The code looks different as far as handling Unicode, but from my tests of the other extension, it seemed capable of handling the Unicode too. (It doesn't deal with the alt text issue brought up in this thread either, btw, but neither does mine.)

    The fact that there have been 9000+ downloads for the extension though might indicate that "Copy Link Text" is a term people are searching for. "Copy Link Name" is not as clear, so I'd suggest at least keeping the reference to Copy Link Text, even if that page links over to Copy Link Name (or use some other way to do that)...

    By Blogger Brett, at Sunday, 02 September, 2007  

  • Well, I wonder if someone knows a addon with the reverse effect. When I find a link as text (not as a clickable link), e.g.
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4750
    there should be an extension, when using the right mouse button with the pointer over a part of this text (usually begins with http and ends with at least one space, often more)
    than it should recognize this as a link and allow me to open it in a new tab.
    THAT would be nice!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Wednesday, 26 September, 2007  

  • THAT is THIS!
    http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_textlink.html.en

    ;)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Monday, 22 October, 2007  

  • This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Monday, 14 July, 2008  

  • Hi I need help, I want to learn how can I copy a specific part due to the terms or keys (only to copy the parts between the search terms)automatically from a htm or html or text or html editor file. so that I can copy the parts between two search terms automatically from my files, this terms can be codes or just text. is there any Free programs avaliable to use for specific search and copy the parts between the search terms including the search terms automatically from my files.

    otherwise how can I be able to do that, please help, I don't know programming so I badly need that help.

    Thanx

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, 19 August, 2008  

  • It sounds like you are looking for "regular expressions". There is a Firefox extension called /Find Bar/ which lets you do that (though it may create some problems in your searching in the browser such as not allowing you to search textarea boxes). Many text editing programs have regular expression searching too, like Notepad++. OpenOffice offers them (in a free downloadable program) for Word processing (Microsoft Word does this also, but it uses a non-standard syntax calling them "wildcards".)

    Essentially you would type something like testWord1.*?testWord2 and that would copy everything between and including the search terms, as long as they were on the same line. If the same line might have two of "testWord2" and you wanted to grab text until the farthest one on that line, you could do: testWord1.*testWord2

    If you wanted to search across multiple lines, you could do testWord1[^]*testWord2.

    But you should find a tutorial on regular expressions for more details, as they can be complicated though powerful. However, the time you spend learning them will be extremely uesful, in my opinion, even if you don't wish to become a programmer.

    By Blogger Brett, at Tuesday, 19 August, 2008  

  • would you pls put all context items into a context submenu for saving up spaces of a long list of context items?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Friday, 31 October, 2008  

  • Anonymous, check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/710

    By the way, one truly awesome add-on (but which requires knowledge of JavaScript and has given me some buggy behavior in the past) is http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/ctxextensions/index.html.en . This lets you add items to the context menu based on JavaScript.

    (My favorite uses for that extension, when I had it working a while ago, were to directly open the edit page for a right-clicked wiki article without first going to the page, and to "append" text to the clipboard (as opposed to replacing it)...)

    By Blogger Brett, at Friday, 31 October, 2008  

  • Do you know how I can do this: I want to simply right-click a link and be able to "Save Link As..." with the link's text as the default filename. Currently I have to right-click, copy link text, right-click again, save link as, and then paste. Ideally I want to right-click once and have a context menu item which performs both actions. Either that or be able to configure your extension so that right-clicking (or middle-clicking) a link automatically copies it without me having to select "Copy Link Text". That would save a step. Thanks.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Saturday, 06 December, 2008  

  • Firefox has some fairly involved looking code to determine the text to display. I don't believe I can add the functionality very easily, but if you clarify a little maybe it would be possible (I don't see any extensions out there which already do this).

    Usually, you want to have a file extension, rather than just the link text, no?

    By Blogger Brett, at Saturday, 06 December, 2008  

  • Actually I was able to determine that what I wanted was a lot easier to accomplish server-side by rewriting the headers within the php script which generates the target files, to force FF to download each link when clicked, with the proper filename as the default, like so:

    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . $_GET['target_filename'] . "\");

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sunday, 07 December, 2008  

  • Ok, good to hear you resolved it for your needs--it should be doable client-side too, but it is fairly involved and would depend on a user's wishes anyways...

    best wishes!

    By Blogger Brett, at Monday, 08 December, 2008  

  • Hello, are you interested in the Italian translation of CopyLinkText?

    We already have your past work translated:

    http://www.extenzilla.org/scheda_estensione.php?id=725

    I wish to pass you my email address, but I don't know how...

    Best Regards,

    Underpass

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Wednesday, 10 December, 2008  

  • Hi Underpass,

    Sure, I'd be happy to add the translation. But for your information, there is already another extension very similar to mine which has many localizations already: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/553 . I hadn't known about this when I released mine.

    But if you want me to add it for Italian because you like the little feature in my extension of having a accesskey or because you prefer the Italian equivalent of "Copy link text" instead of "Copy link name", then I'll be happy to add it! :)

    By Blogger Brett, at Wednesday, 10 December, 2008  

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