Shame on me for not posting about the Smart Paster 1.1 plugin before.
In Windows Forms applications I sometimes have to show long messages explaining why an operation failed or to provide additional information. The text is usually provided by the customer or a technical writer. Cutting and pasting it directly is normally not an option as:
- the string is impossible to read in the editor or on paper when it is too long
- there may be formatting characters which have to be escaped
XML and other text formats with quotes in them are even worse.
Unless you use Spart Paster that is;
The Smart Paster inserts the contents in a properly formatted String builder according to the configuration options:
Building XML the brutal way with string (i.e. not using XmlWriter) becomes a piece of cake. This source string in the clipboard:
<root>
<node attribA="a" attribB="b"/>
<path ="c:\temp\test.txt"/>
</root>
Automagically becomes this if you paste it as a StringBuilder called builder:
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(81);
builder.AppendFormat(@"{0}", Environment.NewLine);
builder.AppendFormat(@"{0}{1}", ControlChars.Tab, Environment.NewLine);
builder.AppendFormat(@"{0}{1}", ControlChars.Tab, Environment.NewLine);
builder.AppendFormat(@"{0}", Environment.NewLine);
All quotes and strange characters taken care of. What more can you ask for?
Feel free to drop a few cents in the
tip jar if this post saved you time and money