{clipboard}

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The clipboard command will insert the entire contents of your clipboard.

In many cases, you will only want to insert a part of the contents of your clipboard.

Referencing a part of the clipboard

A very common use case with the clipboard command is only referencing a specific part of the data in your clipboard.

For example, you may have a customer case management system where data could be copied in the following format:

If you wanted to create a snippet that automatically used the name and phone number, you could do that using the clipboard command combined with the {=} (Formula Command) command to reference specific fields.

The following example shows this.

The example above uses the extractregex function. This function uses a regular expression to precisely define what items of the clipboard you want to use. You can learn more about regular expressions in Text Blaze here.

Referencing specific data in your clipboard with regular expressions

The following examples assume your computer's clipboard contains the following text:

Name: John Smith
Age: 32
ID: RFS4215

To reference the name from this text, we could use the following regular expressions:

Now let's write a regular expression to get the user's age. Here we show a couple different approaches:

There are many ways to write a regular expression to grab a specific result that you're looking for.

Handling badly formatted data

Occasionally, you will try to use a regular expression on data that is incorrectly formatted so that the regular expression does not correctly match the data.

For example, imagine the following data was given to you:

Name:
Age: 32
ID: RFS4215

The data is missing the name. If you use the regular expression from the previous section to process this you'll get a "No match found" error.

Sometimes you want to explicitly want an error to occur, but other times you want to insert a fallback value when the regular expression match fails.

There are two basic ways to handle these cases:

1. Using the catch() function.
2. Using the {if} command and the testregex function.

Handling errors with the catch() function

The catch() function evaluates its first argument and returns it.

However, if an error occurs when it is evaluating its first argument, it will return the second argument as a fallback.

Here is a quick example of the catch() function in action:

Here's another example using the catch() function together with a regular expression:

If the contents of your clipboard contains the correctly formatted text "Name: John", for example, the snippet will output "Dear John".

If the regular epression above does not match with the contents of the clipboard, then there will be an error. In that case the catch() command's second argument will output. It will display "Dear Customer".

Handling errors with the if command and the testregex() function

The testregex() function returns a Boolean (yes/no) which can be used as a condition in the {if} command.

That's a very short introduction to using regular expressions together with the clipboard command to only grab the data that you need.

To go more in-depth, see the Regular Expressions section of the Formula Reference page.