Extract urls from rich text in the system clipboard

Questions & Suggestions
1

For context, every month I get an email with a list of links that I need to visit to download some invoices.

What I am trying to do is copy those links to the system clipboard, iterate over each line and open the corresponding url in a new tab.

This is all within chrome and gmail, and so far I haven't been able to get the value of href.

So far I have tried using an AppleScript to get the urls and using the action to set variable with regex. href=["']?(https?://[^"'>]+)

Nothing worked and I am starting to think that maybe I'm trying something that goes beyond Keyboard Maestro.

Has anyone ever done something similar?

2

Hi and welcome to the forum! :wave:t3:

I think this should do it:

Open Any URLs in Clipboard Text.kmmacros (21 KB)

Macro screenshot

Keyboard Maestro Export
Keyboard Maestro Export1356×1554 182 KB

3

Thank you, @noisneil. It didn't work but your approach was helpful. Digging around the documentation for pbpaste, none of the options was showing anything else different from plain text.

The workaround I found was to use a python script from chatGPT:

import sys
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def extract_urls_from_html(html_content):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser')
    anchors = soup.find_all('a')
    urls = [a['href'] for a in anchors if a.get('href')]
    return urls

def main():
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)

    clipboard = app.clipboard()
    mime_data = clipboard.mimeData()
    
    if mime_data.hasHtml():
        html_content = mime_data.html()
        urls = extract_urls_from_html(html_content)
        
        if urls:
            for url in urls:
                print(url)
        else:
            print("No URLs found in clipboard content.")
    else:
        print("Clipboard does not contain HTML content.")

    # You don't need to run the main loop of the QApplication, so we can exit here.
    sys.exit()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

After, I compiled it with pyinstaller and changed the execute shell script action to it:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/extract-urls

It's slow to run but gets a clean list of urls.

Open Any URLs in Clipboard Text.kmmacros (2.8 KB)

Thank you again ! :bowing_man:

4

The example I gave was based on manually copying the contents of an email that contains explicit URLs as text, as I thought that was what you meant.

Glad you figured it out. :+1:t3:

1 Like