6

Possible Duplicate:
How to Select Hyperlink Text in Google Chrome?

Every now and then you just want to copy some text that is a hyperlink. For example, the author is John O'Reilly and there's a hyperlink behind it that links to the author's page. But all I want is to select the words "John O'Reilly". Sometimes this is tricky to do. Is there some sort of keystroke that can disable the hyperlinks temporarily? For example, if you hold shift+ctrl+alt then you can click on a hyperlink and not get redirected so you can choose the text?

I am using Windows 7 and Chrome

Community
  • 1
xiaodai
  • 1,253

4 Answers4

8

Personally, I just drag the cursor over the text I want and hit Ctrl+C, It works 99% of the time, however, I would be interested to see if anyone else comes up with a better solution!

Edit -

On the odd occasion when you can't drag around an exact hyperlink for some reason (e.g. weird CSS causing problems) I try and copy more than is needed then paste into notepad and then copy the exact bit I need.

In the worst case scenario, I do a Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C in order to copy the entire page... some fancy graphical sites really have problems selecting bits of text - but I have not done this in some time.

William Hilsum
  • 117,648
3

If you use Firefox, you can use the Copy Plain Text add-on (most recent version available here). This will allow you to select text and copy the basic text as it is via a right-click.

If you're like me and can't be bothered to hit Ctrl+C each time, you can also install the AutoCopy add-on. After installing Copy Plain Text, you'll need to check off the box in AutoCopy's options to enable the plain text feature.

variant
  • 2,000
2

If you are using Chrome, you can right click on the link, select Inspect element, and double click on the text between the <a> </a> tags, followed by Ctrl + C. It's not ideal, but can be less fiddly than selecting the text with the mouse.

sblair
  • 12,757
0

I copy it into the run dialog, which converts rich text to plain text.

Then I copy from the run dialog to the application.

If you'd like, I can write a quick program to convert the contents of the clipboard to plain text, so it works for all applications?

Mike Christiansen
  • 428