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Anchor From Clipboard

This snippet is universal. It’s useful with markdown files, javascript and html files, so we’ll make a global snippet.

Global Snippets​

Find your global snippet file in File > Preferences > User Snippets and open it. If this file doesn’t exist, create it using the New Global Snippets file... parameter. Type a file name such as global and press Enter. In this case the filename should be global.code-snippets.

Full path to this file in Linux /home/papa/.config/Code/User/snippets/global.code-snippets.

Copy/past this code into the global.code-snippets file, save it and use it.

global.code-snippets
    "anchor": {
        "scope": "javascript,typescript,html,markdown",
        "prefix": "Anchor-from-Clipboard",
        "body": [
            "<a href='${CLIPBOARD/(.*)\\s(.*)/$1/}' class='external'>${CLIPBOARD/.*\\/\\/(www\\.)?([^\\/]+)\\/.*/$2/}</a>",
        ],
        "description": "Make anchor from `clipboard`"
    },

Scope​

Notice this line "scope": "javascript,typescript,html,markdown", in the above code. It is an array of types. If you want to use this snippet in different types of files, you need to insert those types into this array.

RegEx​

The regular expression processes the CLIPBOARD variable, clearing it of redundant data:

CLIPBOARD/.*\\/\\/(www\\.)?([^\\/]+)\\/.*/$2/

As result, after copying the link and executing the snippet via Ctrl + Space we will have:

<a href='https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets' class='external'>code.visualstudio.com</a>

Usage​

Copy some url > type anc in document > press Ctrl + Space > Select Anchor-from-Clipboard

The links you see below are made using this snippet. Easy and fast.

Versions​

At the moment (2021-03-29 13:45:57), I have 5 versions of this snippet:

  1. Anchor-for-Clipboard (clipboard→href; shortened clipboard→between tags)
  2. Anchor-for-Clipboard2 (clipboard→href; highlighted→between tags)
  3. Anchor-for-Clipboard3 (clipboard→href; shortened clipboard: highlighted→between tags)
  4. Anchor-for-Clipboard4 (clipboard→href; highlighted (shortened clipboard)→between tags)
  5. Macro (clipboard→href; shortened clipboard: cleared and capitalized page slug→between tags)

Examples​

For example, if you copied (Ctrl+C) this url:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25703360/regular-expression-extract-subdomain-domain

and do highlight these words: Extract Subdomain

and then start snippets (Ctrl+Space and select some of Anchor-for-Clipboards)…

You’ll get the corresponding output for the Versions section above:

  1. stackoverflow.com
  2. Extract Subdomain
  3. stackoverflow.com: Extract Subdomain
  4. Extract Subdomain (stackoverflow.com)
  5. stackoverflow.com: Regular Expression Extract Subdomain Domain

Source​