I wanted to convert a large number (several hundred) of strings from mixed case to upper case.
Strings were accessible one at a time, through a dialog belonging to a particular application.
So, I sat down to do the work:
repeat
open the dialog on next item
retype string in uppercase
Ugh. Retyping was the longest and most error-prone part of the operation. And easiest to mechanize,
if I could hook Perl into my loop.
I remembered Win32::Clipboard and quickly whipped up this script, ucclip.pl.
Now the slog became bearable (almost pleasant, in a cyborg sort of way):
start the script
repeat
open the dialog on next item
copy string to clipboard (select, ^C) - script uppercases it
paste back into the dialog (^V)
#!perl -w
use strict;
use Win32::Clipboard;
my $clip = Win32::Clipboard("uppercases the clipboard content");
for (;;) {
$clip->WaitForChange();
my $text = uc $clip->GetText();
last if $text =~ /^\s*$/;
print "$text\n";
$clip->Set($text);
}
__END__
=head1 NAME
ucclip.pl
=head1 SYNOPSIS
ucclip
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Loops waiting for change in contents of your Windows Clipboard.
Converts any string that you copy into the Clipboard to uppercase,
ready for pasting.
Also prints the converted string to the console window.
Exits when you copy a blank string into the Clipboard.
=head1 SEE ALSO
perl(1), Win32::Clipboard
=head1 AUTHOR
Rudi Farkas rudif@lecroy.com 7 Apr 2002
=cut
Hey, you know, you could even try to couple this to the SendKeys functionality for further automation of GUI interaction - see Application for 'Quality Assurance' for some discussion of this, and Re: Application for 'Quality Assurance' for a specific example. As you will note from the discussion, there are several modules that are implementing SendKeys in Perl.
