Making Firefox Copy and Paste HTML Code?

March 27, 2008 10:25 AM

Is there a Firefox extension — preferably a Firefox 2 extension — that will alter Firefox's copying behavior so that, when you copy something, it is copied to the clipboard (or pasted from the clipboard) as its HTML, instead of plain text?

For example, if I were to copy this text:

I usually use Google as my search engine.

to the clipboard, it would be pasted as:

I usually use Google as my search engine.

Is there a Firefox extension that would result in the pasting instead being:

I usually use <A HREF="http://www.google.com">Google<A> as my search engine.

I know there are a few Windows-only Firefox extensions out there. Ideally this'd be a crossplatform extension: I use a Windows Firefox on a thumb drive and a Mac Firefox at home, and would like this functionality in both places.

If I get the option of being really picky, this would preferably replace the functionality of copy/paste as opposed to requiring me to learn a new keystroke ...

posted by WCityMike to computers & internet (4 comments total)

CoLT will add a option to the right click menu. To "Copy link text and location to" either html or BBcode.


Is that any good to you?
posted by gergtreble at 10:50 AM on March 27, 2008

I use Extended Copy Menu which allows you to copy as HTML or copy as plain text. However you can't have a keystroke for it, when ctrl+c it copies it as plain text. It works for me on Firefox 2 but with their new add ons site I cant tell if it works on a mac.
posted by lilkeith07 at 10:54 AM on March 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

In Firefox, you can make a selection, right click on it, and select "View Selection Source". It will open the View Source window with the page source of your selection selected, HTML tags and everything.
posted by hellslinger at 10:58 AM on March 27, 2008

Gergtreble: I've actually got CoLT installed; unfortunately that's not the functionality I'm looking for, as I wanted to be able to, say, copy a paragraph full of links and have it copied to the clipboard as HTML.

lilkeith07: That looks like it'll be great! And the right-click menu choice'll do. I'm not sure if it'll work on my Mac, but there's only a few Windows-only Firefox extensions out there, so I daresay the probability's good.

Hellslinger: thanks, but that's a few extra steps I was looking to avoid. If said extension doesn't work on Macs, then I'll definitely employ that route.
posted by WCityMike at 11:10 AM on March 27, 2008