I know firefox has the very useful “Copy clean Link” option in the context menu, but I would like a similar feature for copying links from any other software, like spotify for example. So I am looking for some software that hooks into the clipboard pipeline, and cleans any URL that gets added. I tried googling for something like it, but was completely unsuccessful. Does anyone have a clue how I might go about achieving this?

Thanks in advance :)

Edit: I found out about klipper’s actions, which provide the option to run a command when a string that matches a regex is added to the clipboard buffer. I am not sure how to properly use this though, so any help is appreciated!

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
    0·
    23 hours ago

    You never define “clean”.

    To strip excess URL parameters (i.e. beginning “&”, almost certainly junk) if the clipboard buffer contains a URL and only a URL (Wayland only):

    if url=$(printf '%s' "$(wl-paste --no-newline | awk '$1=$1' ORS=' ')" | egrep -o 'https?://[^ ]+') ; then
  wl-copy "${url%%\&*}"
fi
    • enkers@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      21 hours ago

      Edit: Oh, OP basically already said the same thing.

      I think it really depends on the website and even where you are on the website. For example, if you’re on YT, the watch?v=<b64_id> is probably not something you want to throw away. If you’re on a news site like imaginarynews.com/.../the-article-title/?tracking-garbage=<...> then you probably do. It’s just a matter of having “sane” defaults that work as most people would expect.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        0·
        20 hours ago

        Sure, but my script only gets rid of the second and later parameters, i.e. ones with & not ?. Personally I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single site where an & param is critical. These days there few where the ? matters either, but yes YT is a holdout.

        • ivn@jlai.luEnglish
          0·
          19 hours ago

          There are plenty of sites that use more than one parameters. It’s true that a lot of sites now use the history API instead of url parameters but you can still find plenty, and you have no garante about the parameters order. Any site with a search page that have a few options will probably use url parameters instead of the history API. It’s easier to parse and will end up being shorter most of the time.

    • silly goose meekah@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      22 hours ago

      Fair enough, I haven’t given that too much thought myself until now. After playing around with Firefox’s URL cleaning, I realized there are some parameters I want to keep. So, by clean I mean removing all unnecessary parameters in the URL.

      For example, https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw would become https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw keeps it’s parameter, because it is necessary.

      I guess replicating the logic for deciding which parameters to keep is not trivial, so the easiest solution is probably just manually pasting links into firefox, and just copying them cleanly from there. Thanks for providing some code, though!

    • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      22 hours ago

      Query parameters are junk? They have tons of legitimate uses, they’re one of the better places to keep state.

      • silly goose meekah@lemmy.worldOP
        0·
        10 hours ago

        As a WebDev… URL parameters are definitely not the place to keep state… Were not in the 00’s anymore. They do have legit uses, but we have JS localStorage nowadays.

        • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          9 hours ago

          They have pretty different use cases. Localstorage is for when you want persistence across page loads, not necessarily specific to any particular page but specific to a browser. An example would be storing user-selected light or dark mode.

          Query parameters are specific to a page/URL and you get a lot of things for free when you use them:

          • back/forward navigation
          • bookmarking
          • copy-paste to share
          • page level caching
          • access on both server and client

          Query parameters are good for things like searches, filters, sorting, etc