How to more easily copy & paste from e.g. a {code} block?

[Simon Hardy-Francis]

Let's say I have a {code}echo my line of code{code} block. If the reader wants to copy and paste the 'mycode' text from the wiki page then they must do it with the mouse etc. Very fiddly if doing often. Is there a way to provide some sort of icon which when pressed simply copies the contents of the code block into the copy and paste buffer? Or maybe there is a non-{code} block alternative?

[Thomas Wendel · Accepted solution]

Hi Simon,

As far as I know, double-clicking into the code block will at least select all the code.

Copy/Paste functionality is always a bit tricky to implement into web applications, although possible. Most browsers prohibit the copy/paste functionality as it is a security vulnerability if a web page can read a visitors clipboard. Therefore in Firefox, the user has to tweak the about:config to let JavaScript read and write the local clipboard. Other methods use Java applets to interact with the local clipboard, which is also not nice. So I think this is the reason, why such a click-to-copy button has not been implemented into the {code}-macro yet.

So double-clicking might be your best option so far.

Cheers,

Thomas

[JamieA]

Most sites including bitbucket use Flash for copypaste which seems to work perfectly fine.

[Thomas Wendel]

Copy/paste with Flash may work perfectly fine, true. But it is still a security risk and it uses, well...., Flash. ;-)

[JamieA]

Anyway I just mentioned Flash for completeness as you had talked about java applets and javascript...

[JamieA]

I'm not really a Flash fan but looking on most web sites it's the de facto standard for clipboard manipulation... I have the flash blocker plugin but I don't mind enabling flash for those sites where I want to copy from the code blocks.