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Martin Lepadusch edited this page Mar 30, 2014 · 12 revisions

Scripting

If you need to process items in some non-trivial way you can take advantage of the scripting interface the application provides. This is accessible on command line as copyq eval SCRIPT or copyq -e SCRIPT where SCRIPT is string containing commands written in Javascript-similar scripting language (Qt Script with is ECMAScript scripting language).

Every command line option is available as function in the scripting interface. Command copyq help tab can be written as copyq eval 'print(help("tab"))' (note: print is needed to print the return value of help("tab") function call).

Searching Items

You can print each item with copyq read N where N is item number from 0 to copyq size (i.e. number of items in the first tab) and put item to clipboard with copyq select N. With these commands it's possible to search items and copy the right one with a script. E.g. having file script.js containing

var match = "MATCH-THIS";
var i = 0;
while (i < size() && str(read(i)).indexOf(match) === -1)
    ++i;
select(i);

and passing it to CopyQ using cat script.js | copyq eval - will put first item containing "MATCH-THIS" string to clipboard.

Working with Tabs

By default commands and functions work with items in the first tab. Calling read(0, 1, 2) will read first three items from the first tab. To access items in other tab you need to switch the current tab with tab("TAB_NAME") (or copyq tab TAB_NAME on command line) where TAB_NAME is name of the tab.

For example to search for an item as in the previous script but in all tabs you'll have to run:

var match = "MATCH-THIS";
var Tabs = tab().split("\n");
for (var i in Tabs) {
    tab(Tabs[i]);
    var j = 0;
    while (j < size() && str(read(j)).indexOf(match) === -1)
        ++j;
    if (j < size())
        print("Match in tab \"" + Tabs[i] + "\" item number " + j + ".\n");
}

Scripting Functions

As mentioned above, all command line options are also available for scripting e.g.: show(), hide(), toggle(), copy(), paste(). Additionally there are following scripting functions:

  • str(...) - Returns argument as string.
  • print(...) - Print string on standard output.
  • input() (from v2.1.0) - Returns bytes read from standard input. This is also the input passed to user commands.
  • data(...) (from v2.1.0) - Returns data for current command (clipboard data if command was run automatically on new clipboard content, otherwise data of selected items). Use data("?") to list available formats. For example: data("text/plain") will return the data of the text/plain format.

Example Commands with Scripting

Hint: With CopyQ 2.1.0 the syntax will be a bit easier see #156

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