Hello all,

Sometimes I have the need to select some text thats inside the description
of a weblink.

The problem is that when I go over the text (and the mousecursor turns into
a hand) any left-mouse down is interpreted as a "follow the link", and I
thus cannot start to select text.

tl;dr:
whats the trick to select text when the mousecursor is turned into a hand ?

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

On 5/31/23 23:51, R.Wieser wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Sometimes I have the need to select some text thats inside the description
> of a weblink.
>
> The problem is that when I go over the text (and the mousecursor turns into
> a hand) any left-mouse down is interpreted as a "follow the link", and I
> thus cannot start to select text.
>
> tl;dr:
> whats the trick to select text when the mousecursor is turned into a hand ?
>
> Regards,
> Rudy Wieser
>
>

Hi Rudy,

What I do is select a bunch of stuff before and
after the link. Then paste it to text only editor,
such as Leafpad.

I also right click on the link and copy link.

And I also go into
--> Tools
--> Browser Tools
--> Page source
and hunt it down the hard way. <ctrl><F> (search)
help the hunt.

-T

On 1 Jun 2023 08:51:10 +0200 R.Wieser wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>Sometimes I have the need to select some text thats inside the description
>of a weblink.
>
>The problem is that when I go over the text (and the mousecursor turns into
>a hand) any left-mouse down is interpreted as a "follow the link", and I
>thus cannot start to select text.
>
>tl;dr:
>whats the trick to select text when the mousecursor is turned into a hand ?
>

Right-click on the link, select 'Inspect', which shows the full link code
in the DOM inspector - left pane.

Double-click the highlighted link. Then single-click on the part you want
- which allows you to edit that part, either the URL or the displayed
text. You should find you can now select and copy any section or all of
that part.

That works on Debian, anyway. You may have to experiment with the
double/single clicking on Windows. It takes a bit of practice!

--
(Remove numerics from email address)

R.Wieser wrote:

> whats the trick to select text when the mousecursor is turned into a hand ?

right click and "copy link", you'll have to delete the unwanted parts
where you paste it to, rather than where you copy it from.

On 1 Jun 2023 09:15:50 +0100 Andy Burns wrote:
>
>right click and "copy link", you'll have to delete the unwanted parts
>where you paste it to, rather than where you copy it from.

I thought 'text in the description of a weblink' in the OP might mean the
_displayed_ text, not the URL. Thought I often use T's method - select the
text plus a bit, and edit that out after pasting. But sometimes that's
difficult - the link is inside another.

Related to this, I have a bookmarklet that displays the title of a page so
I can easily copy and paste it when making a link to a news article, say:

javascript:(function(){alert(document.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].textContent)})()

--
(Remove numerics from email address)

Dave Royal wrote:

> I thought 'text in the description of a weblink' in the OP might mean the
> _displayed_ text, not the URL.

maybe, a way to copy the text is to select from before the description ,
to after it, rather than leave the mouse over it, and then copy

T,

> What I do is select a bunch of stuff before and
> after the link. Then paste it to text only editor,

Thats what I have been doing too. Work that I can do without.

> I also right click on the link and copy link.

That doesn't copy the words which the link is ... linked too.

Imagine this:

<a href="foo.com">the quick brown fox jumps over</a>

I would like to be able to copy "brown fox".

> --> Page source

I've got that one open rather often. :-) Same thing though, work that I
could do without.

One thing you did not mention is "inspect element" (javascript inspector).
:-)

Its rather slow in showing itself, but it (normally) is already zoomed into
the part you're interrested in.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Dave,

> Right-click on the link, select 'Inspect', which shows the full link
> code in the DOM inspector - left pane.

Yeah, that works here too (and have done it a few times). Thing is that it
takes multiple seconds for the inspection pane to actually show itself.
Besides that its an extra step I could do without.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Andy,

> right click and "copy link",

Thats not available on my version of FF I'm afraid. Just "copy link
location", which isn't what I'm interrested in.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Dave,

> I thought 'text in the description of a weblink' in the OP might mean
> the _displayed_ text, not the URL

You thought correct.

> Related to this, I have a bookmarklet that displays the title of a page so
> I can easily copy and paste it when making a link to a news article, say:
>
> javascript:(function(){alert(document.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].textContent)})()

That looks good, thanks.

Though part of the problem that its sometimes hard to even select the full
displayed text of the link.

Example :

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/index.html

Try to select any of the headers in the right column. It works when
starting from the end, but when (trying) to start from the begin of a header
its problematic, and mostly select way more text than wanted.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

"R.Wieser" <address@is.invalid> wrote:

> Dave,
>
>> I thought 'text in the description of a weblink' in the OP might mean
>> the _displayed_ text, not the URL
>
> You thought correct.
>
>> Related to this, I have a bookmarklet that displays the title of a page so
>> I can easily copy and paste it when making a link to a news article, say:
>>
>> javascript:(function(){alert(document.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].textContent)})()
>
> That looks good, thanks.
>
> Though part of the problem that its sometimes hard to even select the full
> displayed text of the link.
>
> Example :
>
> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/index.html
>
> Try to select any of the headers in the right column. It works when
> starting from the end, but when (trying) to start from the begin of a header
> its problematic, and mostly select way more text than wanted.
>
> Regards,
> Rudy Wieser

Almost all the links at the web site have some whitespace after them
allowing you to click and drag from the end of the anchor comment to the
beginning, and copy the comment.

It's when I got near the end where there is a box with "New stories"
with links pointing off-domain (newzit.com) that there is no whitespace
after the comment text. Those articles are in a table in a div object,
so I right-click on an article text, and select Inspect. That brings up
the Dev Console with Inspector pane pre-selected. You have to backup to
the 2nd prior enclosing DIV element to see the title, right-click, and
select "Edit as HTML". Yeah, lots of work, but that's what happens DIV
is used with CSS class to emulate an <A> anchor for a hyperlink. They
don't see it as their responsibility to make it easy to steal, er,
borrow their content.

Sorry, I don't know why Dev Console takes so much longer to show in your
setup than mine. When I did Inspect, or hit F12, the Dev Console opens
immediately. Could be with my use of uBlock Origin, and the set of
blacklists to which it is configured, along with my settings of uBO,
that lots of crap resources were not retrieved, so they aren't part of
the web doc to deal with in Dev Console.

Of course, once you click on the Newzit redirect link, and then again in
the separate News Stories page to click again on the same article, the
article then gets loaded, and you can copy its title from there.

On 6/1/23 02:58, R.Wieser wrote:
> T,
>
>> What I do is select a bunch of stuff before and
>> after the link. Then paste it to text only editor,
>
> Thats what I have been doing too. Work that I can do without.
>
>> I also right click on the link and copy link.
>
> That doesn't copy the words which the link is ... linked too.
>
> Imagine this:
>
> <a href="foo.com">the quick brown fox jumps over</a>
>
> I would like to be able to copy "brown fox".
>
>> --> Page source
>
> I've got that one open rather often. :-) Same thing though, work that I
> could do without.
>
> One thing you did not mention is "inspect element" (javascript inspector).
> :-)
>
> Its rather slow in showing itself, but it (normally) is already zoomed into
> the part you're interrested in.
>
> Thanks for the suggestions though.
>
> Regards,
> Rudy Wieser
>
>

If you want to pay homage to Rube Goldberg, you
can always use curl pipped to grep pipped to awk
pipped to xsel!

VanguardLH,

> Almost all the links at the web site have some whitespace after them

It was ment as an example, not the exact something that needed to be solved.

> Sorry, I don't know why Dev Console takes so much longer to show in
> your setup than mine.

I don't know either, but its slowness is not the real issue. What is is
that I would like to have simple way to do the selection, not depending on
multi-step work-arounds.

> Could be with my use of uBlock Origin, and the set of blacklists to
> which it is configured, along with my settings of uBO, that lots of
> crap resources were not retrieved,

Similar here. Third-party content doesn't get loaded, - unless I make an
exception.

I don't have an ad-blocker, but somehow I seldom see ads. <grin>

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

T,

> If you want to pay homage to Rube Goldberg, you
> can always use curl pipped to grep pipped to awk
> pipped to xsel!

Only if you print it out and take a photo of it on a wooden table. :-)

Though "Rube Goldberg machine" is pretty-much what I regard my currentl
available work-arounds as. :-\

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

On 6/1/23 2:20 AM, Andy Burns wrote:
> Dave Royal wrote:
>
>> I thought 'text in the description of a weblink' in the OP might mean the
>> _displayed_ text, not the URL.
>
> maybe, a way to copy the text is to select from before the description ,
> to after it, rather than leave the mouse over it, and then copy

Mouse-selecting from right to left rather than the normal left-to-right
method sometimes works if you start in a blank area.

--
Cheers, Bev
"Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the
bodies of the people who pissed me off."

The Real Bev,

> Mouse-selecting from right to left rather than the normal left-to-right
> method sometimes works if you start in a blank area.

Yes, that works /if/ you can find a blank area. Though I'm than still
dealing with having to paste it to a text editor and than copy the part
outof it I actually need.

Too much work ! :-)

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Op do 01-06-2023 om 12:04 schreef R.Wieser:

> Thats not available on my version of FF I'm afraid. Just "copy link
> location", which isn't what I'm interrested in.

Try Shift + arrow keys to select what you want to copy, then Ctrl+C.
Or copy from the source using Ctrl+U (FF), Ctrl+F3 iirc (OE).

--
Alex.

On 1 Jun 2023 12:02:20 +0200 R.Wieser wrote:
>Dave,
>
>> Right-click on the link, select 'Inspect', which shows the full link
>> code in the DOM inspector - left pane.
>
>Yeah, that works here too (and have done it a few times). Thing is that it
>takes multiple seconds for the inspection pane to actually show itself.
>Besides that its an extra step I could do without.

I wondered whether it would be easy for an addon to add a 'copy link text'
item to the context menu.

You can add an item to a context menu:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Context_menu_items

That page links to an example which copies the link URL to the clipboard
in plain text and html:

https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/main/context-menu-copy-link-with-types

That could be changed to paste or display (as an alert - which can be
copied like my bookmarklet) the link text instead - linkText instead of
linkURL on line 17 of background.js

--
(Remove numerics from email address)

T

> If you want to pay homage to Rube Goldberg, you
> can always use curl pipped to grep pipped to awk
> pipped to xsel!

In that regard I think you will like this story :

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Alex,

> Try Shift + arrow keys to select what you want to copy,

In a browser ? That doesn't work.

For instance, how do I set the start of the selection ? There is no cursor
to move around.

> Or copy from the source using Ctrl+U (FF), Ctrl+F3 iirc (OE).

Yes, I'm aware of a number of work-arounds for FireFox. Either thru the
webpage source or the "javascript inspector". Even saving the page and
opening it in a text editor is possible.

The thing is that all of those have become tedious. I'm looking for a
"select text and copy" method - just as if its non-link text.
Quick-and-easy.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Dave,

> I wondered whether it would be easy for an addon to add a 'copy link
> text' item to the context menu.

:-) I've already been searching for that - especially as I've got the
GreaseMonkey plugin.

There is one thing I've always have a problem with though : neither of those
links mentions in which versions of FF the code is supposed to run. I could
try it and if I'm lucky it will work. If I'm unlucky it won't. And if I'm
/really/ unlucky it will partly work - with no idea what the side effects
will be. :-|

Still, thanks for the links. :-)

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Op do 01-06-2023 om 20:47 schreef R.Wieser:
> Alex,
>
>> Try Shift + arrow keys to select what you want to copy,
>
> In a browser ? That doesn't work.
>
> For instance, how do I set the start of the selection ? There is no cursor
> to move around.

Just click where the selection should start or end. Then Shift + arrow keys.

--
Alex.

On 1 Jun 2023 20:58:41 +0200 R.Wieser wrote:
>Dave,
>
>> I wondered whether it would be easy for an addon to add a 'copy link
>> text' item to the context menu.
>
>:-) I've already been searching for that - especially as I've got the
>GreaseMonkey plugin.
>
>There is one thing I've always have a problem with though : neither of those
>links mentions in which versions of FF the code is supposed to run. I could
>try it and if I'm lucky it will work. If I'm unlucky it won't. And if I'm
>/really/ unlucky it will partly work - with no idea what the side effects
>will be. :-|
>
>Still, thanks for the links. :-)

The main API used was introduced in Fx 55 -see:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/menus/create
though some features of the addon might be a bit later.
--
(Remove numerics from email address)

On 6/1/23 11:32, R.Wieser wrote:
> T
>
>> If you want to pay homage to Rube Goldberg, you
>> can always use curl pipped to grep pipped to awk
>> pipped to xsel!
>
> In that regard I think you will like this story :
>
> https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer
>
> Regards,
> Rudy Wieser
>
>

Oh Geez! And I thought that Brave Browser not
printing my Amazon invoices correctly being
solved by taking an Xfce Screenshot and opening
in Eye of Gnome and printing from Eye of Gnome
was worky!

R.Wieser <address@is.invalid> wrote:
> whats the trick to select text when the mousecursor is turned into a hand ?

On Windows you can supposedly hold the Alt key and select the text:
https://superuser.com/a/1276159

I need to figure out how to make this work on Linux one day. The
Alt + Win key combo isn't working for me (possibly window manager
settings) and I don't always have a Win key anyway. Disabling the
link drag feature permanently would be ideal for me, but I've never
found a setting that does so.

Thankfully I usually need to do this with sites that are browsable
in my preferred browser, Dillo, which doesn't have this link drag
feature in the first place so link text selection works fine there.

Ah, actually here's an add-on that claims to solve the problem in
Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/select-like-a-boss/

And another:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drag-select-link-text/

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