Truncate Clipboard

Questions & Suggestions
1

Hey Keyboard Maestros!

I ran into a problem, that I was unable to solve myself - it’s a pretty simple task.

I want to have a specific number of characters truncated from the clipboard.

For example:

Clipboard: “Exampletext”

something like “truncate three letters from end”

leads to “Examplet”

Any idea how to solve that? Is that possible in Keyboard Maestro at all?

Thanks much!!

Julian

2

Hey Julian,

See the Substring of Variable or Clipboard action.

Make sure to familiarize yourself with all the different options.

-Chris

2 Likes
3

Amazing! Thanks so much. That’s perfect

4

Just checked them all out, it works great. I tried to play with “delete to” and was wondering, if it’s also possible to delete up to a certain character instead of a character count.

Something like

text: " abcdef" -> delete to “d” -> output: “ef”

just typing in the text or a variable didn’t do the trick

5

Hey Julian,

To do that you really need to search/replace a variable or the clipboard.

Using a regular expression with case-insensitive:

The input (excluding the quotes):

" abcdef"

Find:

^.*d(.+)

Replace:

$1

RegEx → Test KM Find & Replace RegEx.kmmacros (3.2 KB)

-Chris

1 Like
6

Thanks Chris for your fast response! It works great! Is there any documentation about what exactly is going on?

^.*d(x+) and $1 is pretty mysterious to me.

Besides “d” in ^.*d(x+) which seems to be the last one that gets deleted I have no idea what the rest means. What for example, if you want to do the same, but from the back of the string?

Thanks so much!

7

Hey Julian,

Sure. A couple of hundred books on regular expressions.   :smile:

^.*d(.+)

^  ==  Beginning of line
.  ==  Any character
*  ==  Zero or more of the previous token
d  ==  A literal character “d”
(  ==  Start Capture-Group
.  ==  Any character
+  ==  1 or more of the previous token
)  ==  End Capture group.

$1  ==  Represents the 1st (and only) Capture-Group

So I'm finding any characters from the beginning of the string until “d”, and I'm capturing the rest.

Then I replace-all with the captured text.

See an analysis here:

BBEdit/TextWrangler RegEx Cheat Sheet (Syntax mostly compatible with Keyboard Maestro.)

Keyboard Maestro's regular expression syntax is available via a menu item in the editor's help menu.

-Chris

1 Like