Copy and paste from skype includes unwanted characters

copy/paste

I tried to copy the following line from Skype:

blah123

I got an error when I tried to paste it into another app to use it. So I pasted that into a hex editor and it looked like this in the hex editor:

 blah123

I don't know if that was just a problem with copy from Skype or if it could happen in other applications. What I want to know is a way to copy and paste from applications on mac osx ignoring all these unwanted 'invisible' characters.

Best Answer

As far as I know it is impossible avoid the copy of these weird characters. But you can remove them using an editor like TextWrangler. TextWrangler has an useful menu option "Text" -> "Zap gremlins".

This options identify and replace:

  • Non Ascii characters
  • Control characters
  • Null (Ascii 0) characters

So, when I cannot avoid to copy from Skype (I suggest to use emails for important text) and I would be sure to remove all weird characters, better paste/zap/copy all the text within TextWrangler.

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