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 found a conversation about this with a quick google search

Answer 2

It is very easy via AppleScript (tested in 10.11 El Capitan):

set the clipboard to (the clipboard as «class RTF »)

---

You can create a Service via Automator:

1. open Automator
2. make new service ("Dienst" in German)
3. add "execute a AppleScript"
4. input: nothing; output; replaces Selection

The Script:

-- name: convert to RTF
on run {input, parameters}
    set the clipboard to (the clipboard as «class RTF »)
    return the clipboard
end run

Done. Now save the new Service and to try it out: Select a text, then go to the Application Menu and choose "Services" > "convert to RTF"

Answer 3

I think that at least on OS X 10.8 this would work if you copied HTML content from Chrome:

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

Answer 4

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.