CDD2- Clippity Dippity Do 2.0 1995-2004 John C. Rahn http://www.johnrahn.com/dev cdd@johnrahn.

com (comments welcome) Document date: January 27, 2004 1. What is CDD? 2. What s New? 3. System Requirements 4. View Text 5. View Link/String Catcher 6. Clear Clipboard 7. Turn Off CDD (Leave running) 8. Options Menu 9. Log File Details 10. Miscellaneous Notes, Mailing List, Donate 1. What is CDD? CDD 2.0 is a freeware program written to enhance the functionality of the Window s Clipboard. With CDD you can perform many automatic operations around your clipboard when copying and pasting. First, CDD can convert all data copied to t he clipboard to plain text. This will, for example and among many other things, pr event programs like MS Word from going out to the net to retrieve text from a web page when all you wanted to do was paste the plain text. CDD can log all data you copy t o the clipboard in plain text files. In addition to logging everything in a variety o f ways is an option to log just URL s and web links you copy to the clipboard in separate logs. 2. What s new? Originally, CDD was a 16-bit multiple clipboard tool which did some of the thing s above but primarily was a multiple clipboard utility. With recent versions of Windows and applications like Office multiple clipboards became unnecessary as did CDD reall y. CDD 2 s focus is more on the conversion of clipboard data to text and the logging of data to text files. The interface between CDD1 and CDD2 is totally different but the spirit of clipboard enhancement remains the same. 3. System Requirements CDD uses very little resources and lives in the system tray, next to the clock. C DD may also be configured to launch with a shortcut, execute the commands you prese t for it, then exit immediately thus using resources only when absolutely needed and using zero the rest of the time. Any PC that can run recent versions of Windows (XP and 200 0 especially) should be able to run CDD. Older versions of Windows can run CDD bu t systems with lower resources may not be able to handle large amounts of clipboar d data

conversion at once. For those systems most of CDD will still work but the built in crash prevention will truncate data when necessary. Most of the memory that CDD uses is right after you place data on the clipboard so the more data that is copied mean s the more memory CDD will use during its processing phases. CDD will act in a way so as not to put your system resources critically low at any given time. 4. View Text The first item in CDD s menu is View Text which is where you can see the most recent data you copied to the clipboard and that CDD converted to text. You can set this window to show itself automatically at start in the Options menu. 5. View Link/String Catcher The second item in CDD s menu is View Link/String Catcher. Here you can see all the

links this session of CDD has pulled off of the clipboard. If logging is on, th ese will be saved to a text file for you. You can set this window to show itself automatica lly at start in the Options menu. The purpose of the Link Catcher is to identify single URL' s, EMail addresses, FTP & NNTP addresses. For example, if you have a document/web p age open and see a link you want to log with Link Catcher then you would just mark a nd copy it to the clipboard. You can also right click a link in IE then select "Co py shortcut" for the same effect. If Link Catcher is on and logging is on then you'll have a record of that for your use later. CDD will can also look for links within other text and try to parse them out depending on how you set the options. However, because of the enormous variety of the way links could be in text some precautions have been taken to sa ve some processing power and assure you generally log the links you intended and not too much of what you didn't intend. One of the steps taken is that any text string greate r than 256 characters will automatically be rejected as being a link. This will rarely be a problem but be aware of that. The main clipboard logger will still pick them up. Also, copying more than 1 link at a time could result in all the links copied at that one time being identified as one link. There will still be a log of those links but under one entry. The best way to get a feel for this is to open the link catcher window then load a w eb page such as news.google.com. Then Start copying links to the clipboard to observe h ow link catcher deals with them. The Link Catcher window will show all log worthy URL's it has found since it was loaded. 6. Clear Clipboard

Simply put, this third menu item clears all text and most other items off of the clipboard. 7. Turn Off CDD (Leave running) The fourth menu item enables you to turn off all of CDD s clipboard features while leaving CDD running and waiting for you to turn it back on or exit the program. You can turn off CDD by default in the Options menu. 8. Options Menu The CDD Options menu is where preferences are set for CDD. Reset all CDD option s by deleting CDD2.INI then restart CDD. You can access the Options menu not only by right clicking on the Options item in the system tray but also by double-clicking on t he CDD tray icon. NONE OF THE OPTIONS WILL TAKE EFFECT OR BE SAVED unless you click the Save Changes button after making the changes. If you have clicked something and are not sure you want to make that change then simply click the Can cel button and nothing will be changed. All settings will take effect as soon as yo u check "Save Changes" and will stick when you restart CDD. The Options are as follows: a. CDD ON? If unchecked, CDD will not convert clipboard data to text and wi ll not save clipboard text or links to log files. This is a master on/off switch. b. Beep? If checked CDD will beep when new data is detected on the clipboar d. c. Auto Open Viewers? If checked, then CDD will display the View Text and Link/String catcher windows automatically when you start CDD. d. Hit & Run? When checked and saved, this option does everything you have told CDD to do but only one time with what is already on the clipboard then immediately exits. If you select and save this option you have effectively removed access to CDD s Options menu because the program will immediately exit after it runs through one cycle. You can get back to the Options menu by running the command: cdd2.exe 99 after which if you want to turn off Hit & Run you must do so during that session and click Save Changes . You could also edit the cdd2.ini file and set the line HITNRUN=0 under the [CDD] section or delete cdd2.ini to reset all options. e. Select Frequency For CDD to check Clipboard- the options are from 1 to 5 . 1 is the most frequent and 5 is the least frequent. The numbers translate loosely in to seconds. You should leave it on one unless you are having performance issues. However, if you were to copy two items within 5 seconds on setting 5 you would probably miss getting a log of one item. This option is intended to help with systems that are very slow to begin with and even better, for users who copy & paste slowly anyway. f. Clipboard Logging *Auto Save Clipboard Text to a Log- Checking this allows the code to execute telling CDD you want to save a text copy of everything that is copied to the clipboard. It is not affected by the Link Catcher On setting but is affected by the CDD On setting. If CDD On is unchecked then you cannot log text from the clipboard to a file with CDD until they are both checked. You can change the directory for the logs by browsing for a directory with the open folder button to the upper left of the option. *One continuous appended CDD.TXT file- if selected your main clipboard log files will be saved to a single file named CDD.TXT. This

file could get very large very quickly . . . keep an eye on it and delete/rename it if needed. *One file per clip copy with date_time as file name-With this option you will get one new log file for every new chunk of data you copy to the clipboard. This file will be named with the date and time. *One File per date with date stamp as file name-If you selected this option (default) then a new log will be generated each day with all clipboard data from that day. The file name will be the current date. g. Link Catcher/Logging *Link Catcher On- this enables the CDD code that strips URL s out of clipboard data and saves it to log file to run. If "CDD On" is unchecked then you cannot log URL s from the clipboard to a file with CDD until they are both checked. *Save Links From Linkcatcher/Clipboard to a File? If unchecked and Link Catcher is on, then you ll be able to view URL s as they re captured on the clipboard but they will not be saved to a log. You can change the directory for the logs by browsing for a directory with the open folder button to the upper left of the option. *Strict URL s- When checked, CDD will only consider capturing a URL if the left most text on the clipboard starts with an identifier that could definitely be a URL such as HTTP:, mailto: , etc. If unchecked, it will still capture those types of URL s but will also search deeper in text to pull out URL s. This may take some time in big chunks of data, but in any case will never search a stream larger than 256 characters to be safe. Also, the URL s captured when this option is unchecked are more likely to contain text that is not truly part of the URL. This is a case of the rules being relaxed to err on the side of capturing the most data. If you re only looking to capture URL s by, for example, right clicking on links in IE then selecting Copy Shortcut or by copying them from the IE address bar then the best option is leaving Strict URL s checked. *One continuous appended CDDURL.TXT- This will save all captured URL s to cddurl.txt. *One File per day, date stamp as file name (uDateTime.txt)- This will save all captured link files to a new file based on the date. The file name will begin with the letter u (for URL), then the date. The time the URL is logged will be broken down inside the log file. 9. Log File Details Log File Name Formats & Internal Structures The names of log files and organization of data within them will depend on what options you pick for auto-saving text and URL's in the Options system. By default all l og files are placed in the same working directory as cdd.exe. If you have specified anot her directory then you'll find the logs there. You can view them with any text edit or. Full Clipboard Logs Option 1-One Continuous appended CDD.TXT file For this option their will be one log file named CDD.TXT. Every saved entry wit hin cdd.txt will have a section in brackets []. The data you see in the brackets wi ll be the date and time in one long number, so if you see this: [20040122175133] it means the clip was stored at 5:51 PM on Jan 22, 2004. [YYYYMMDDHHMMSS] is the break down. The text will be prefixed with "TEXT="

Option 2-One file per clip copy with date_time as file name. With this option you will have a new log file every time new data is put on the clipboard. The file names will be in the format of date_time.txt. So, a file with the name 20040122_175854.txt was saved at 5:58PM on Jan 22,2004. Breakdown: YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.txt. The majority of this file will be what you copied to the clipboard excep t at the very beginning you'll see the following: [LogEntry] TEXT= This means little to CDD at this time but will be used in future versions to eas ily browse your CDD files within the new program. Option 3-One File per date with date stamp as file name This option will create a new log file each day. All text copied to the clipboa rd during any particular day will be saved to that one file if set to do so. The file name format for this log is date.txt therefore a filename such as 20040127.txt indicated the fil e was from Jan 27, 2004 [YYYYMMDD]. Inside the file you ll find a structure like this for ea ch piece of text saved to the log: [20040127103809] TEXT= The info in brackets would indicated the data was saved on Jan 27, 2004 at 10:38 am. [YYYYMMDDHHMMSS] LinkUrlCatcher Log Options: Option 1-One continuous appended CDDURL.TXT Saving URLs/Links to log files in the method will create a file named cddurl.txt . A new section with the current date will be created for each date and under the date w ill be all the links copied to the clipboard that day with the time stamp. It will look so mething like this: [20040127] 104337=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084503/ 105000=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002097/ [20040202] 225246=http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/7787018.htm 225300=http://www.wftv.com/news/2795505/detail.html The very first URL entry you see above can be translated as being logged on Jan 27,2004 at 10:43am. The third one from contracostatimes.com was logged at 10:52pm on Fe b 02,2004. The headers headings break down as follows: [20040127] [YYYYMMDD] The time entries break down as follows: 225300

HHMMSS Option 2=One File per day, date stamp as file name (uDateTime.txt) Option 2 saves a log of all links copied to the clipboard for a given day. The time is not included in the file name but within the log file contents. This log file optio n creates files beginning with a letter u then the date. Inside the log file you ll find your links logged and organized by the hour and minute they were captured. A log file with a name like u20040127.txt will have content like this: [10] 5959=http://www.wftv.com/news/2455821/detail.html [13] 0005=http://www.wftv.com/weather/ Thus, given the log file name of "u20040127.txt" we can tell the first link was logged on Jan 27,2004 at 10:59am and the second URL was logged on the same day (because it s in the same file) at 1:00pm. It breaks down like this: [10] [HH] and 5959= MMSS= 10. Miscellaneous Notes & Mailing List You can delete, move, and rename any log file DD. You can delete the cdd2.ini file while CDD is ings may happen it should cause no harm. The best way is to first exit CDD, delete the cdd2.ini file, and at any time without detriment to C running and, although a few odd th method to reset the settings this then restart CDD.

CDD generally does not log exactly the same text twice in a row. The most likel y cause of double entries is loading CDD after a previous CDD session without changes to the clipboard and very subtle changes in copied text such as case and spacing. If you would like to be on the mailing list for CDD updates just send a message to CDD@JOHNRAHN.COM with the subject: SUBSCRIBE You address will NEVER be shared with any other party and you ll only receive messages about updates to the CDD program. Donations of CDD. You PayPal is , money order, or in any amount are greatly appreciated and encourage future development can send a donation via PayPal donation johnrahn2000@hotmail.com. located at https://www.paypal.com/. If you would like to send a check anything else: John C. Rahn 4721 Lighthouse Rd Orlando, FL 32808 USA.