Getting RTF data out of Mac OS X pasteboard (clipboard)

Question

According to the man page for pbpaste,

   -Prefer {txt | rtf | ps}
          tells pbpaste what type of data to look for  in  the          


        

Answer 1

I can't see any way to do it from inside AppleScript, but since you're working in the shell anyway, I'd just post-process it: the "hex-encoded crap" is the RTF data you want. The simplest script I can think of is

perl -ne 'print chr foreach unpack("C*",pack("H*",substr($_,11,-3)))'

An explanation: substr($_,11,-3) strips off the «data RTF and »\n bits (each of the guillemets is two bytes); pack("H*", ...) packs hex-encoded data into a bytestream; unpack("C*", ...) unpacks a bytestream into an array of character values; print chr foreach ... converts each integer in the array to its corresponding character and prints it; and the -ne options evaluate the script given for each line, with that line implicitly stored in $_. (If you want that script in its own file, just make sure the shebang line is #!/usr/bin/perl -ne.) Then, running

osascript -e 'the clipboard as «class RTF »' | \
  perl -ne 'print chr foreach unpack("C*",pack("H*",substr($_,11,-3)))'

will give you raw RTF output.