Manipulating Text Using Services 5
Tip
Hey
The Services menu is like a super car disguised as a town car, its got a lot of power in the hood yet not many people know or use it. Quite a while ago I mentioned about inserting the date and time using this method. Today I am going to point out and show you a couple of cool tricks which you can use to manipulate text. I have started to use this option quite frequently and is proving very useful.
Edit: Before you start you need WordService. I’ve had this plugin installed for a long time and I didn’t realise you need it.
How many times have you copied a piece of text or written a piece of text in all caps. Really annoying. If you want to change the format of it you can use the Convert menu option. Under the [App Name] > Services > Convert you will find a couple of options.
The four options I would like to point out is “All Caps, Initial Caps, Lower Case and Quotes”. If you select a piece of text and then select an option (or press the key command) it will convert the text for you. Similar to most Services menu options this will only work if you are running a Cocoa app, such as TextEdit, Mail etc. For instance if you have a sentence which you have written you can use the “Initial Caps of Sentences” to turn all of the correct words to caps. Its smart enough to figure out which words need gaps based on fullstops and punctuation.
If you are a programmer of any kind, you will at some point end up using quotes. In different languages different quotes mean different things. An example of this is PHP where I have spent hours trying to figure out what is wrong, only to realise the quote marks were wrong. Using the Quotes option under the Services menu will enable you to change all of them to the right one. This is especially useful if you are copying text from the Internet.
Try these tricks out. They are very useful and will definetly save you some time.
Where To Next?
5 Responses to “Manipulating Text Using Services”
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1
I do not have the “Convert” menu option in my services menu? I use TextEdit as application. Is there a way to add this?
Comment By David on May 10th, at 11:31 pm
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2
Sorry my bad, did not catch the thing about downloading the WordService plug-in. Anyway thanks for tip :)
Comment By David on May 10th, at 11:45 pm
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3
> An example of this is PHP where I have spent hours trying to figure out what is wrong, only to realise the quote marks were wrong.
This is what you get for copying/pasting code from a blog. :)
There’s only one set of quote symbols used in common development languages. What you ran into is a situation where the author of a blog didn’t place his or her code inside of a pre or code tag; that causes WordPress to parse it as normal text – that means it converts them into the cooler (for typography types) type of quotes.
Comment By l on May 30th, at 5:34 pm
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4
dont work with leopard snow :)
Comment By vld on October 6th, at 8:03 am
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5
sweet! this is perfect for what I needed. Was wanting to sort some text alphabetically in pages and the only other solution I could find was to copy the list into a table and sort it that way. This is a much better solution
Comment By Ben on February 22nd, at 10:58 pm