RKG Duck: A Windows Clipboard Filter

Download

Download RKG Duck: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/content/rkg-duck.zip

Overview

RKG Duck is a free tool which applies a Perl filter to the Windows clipboard.

Because the clipboard works within and between nearly every Windows application, RKG Duck lets you transform data within Excel, Powerpoint, Word, Notepad, etc. with ease.

Because RKG Duck uses Perl for its filtering code, you have the rich power of Perl regular expressions, the extraordinary depth of pluggable Perl modules (CPAN), and the ability to use the same filters as is on the Windows or Linux command line.

You can watch a demo 1 or demo 2 on YouTube. We made a a super-fast overview demo video, too.

Use

We’ve found RKG Duck helpful manipulating data for paid search campaigns, but the tool can be used in many other areas.

You can use the program to expand shortcut acronyms (ala Texter), analyze text for reading level or awkward constructions, extract query strings from Apache logs, encrypt or decrypt text — just about anything.

Plugins

To add plugins, place additional Perl scripts in the program’s directory. Name these files with the prefix “filer_”, as in “filter_foo.pl”, “filter_bar.pl”, etc.

Here’s the basic template for a plugin filter: # foo->bar demo filter # input from STDIN, output to STDOUT use strict; while (<STDIN>) { s/foo/bar/g; # do some sort of transform print; # send the result to STDOUT. } # RKGDUCK # documentation at www.rimmkaufman.com/duck

If you want to use a filter to modify a column in Excel in situ, make sure the filter outputs the same number of rows as it reads.

If you wish to use CPAN modules, place them in same directory as the filters, and be sure to “use” them in your filter.

Technology

RKG Duck is a small Perl TK script bundled with PAR. The bundling isn’t particularly efficient, as it rolls in the Perl binaries and all required modules. This is why the executable is so large. PAR is finicky, and the resulting bundle might not work on all Windows installs.

Command Line

Because RKG Duck filters are well-formed Perl scripts, you can use them from the Windows or Linux command line on files as well. A well-installed Linux distro will have Perl available by default. On Windows, you can download free Perl binaries from ActiveState.

License

RKG Duck is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.