Poly

A simple command for converting and processing data from your clipboard.

Installation

Via pip

Poly is available on PyPi under the name poly-cli. To install it, simply do

python3 -m pip install poly-cli

Via pipx

From Python 3.12 and on, especially on Mac, you are warned against/forbidden from installing Python packages in an "externally-managed" environment (AKA in user space).

PIP will recommend that you install things using pipx which should manage virtual environments for you.

To install Poly this way, the interface is the same, so simply do

pipx install poly-cli

From this point on, the Poly CLI can be accessed with the cli command poly. See "Usage" below

Environment Variable Config

There are environment variables you can set to control the behavior of Poly:

POLY_CFG_COLOR

Default: 1

Setting this value to 0 will result in no syntax highlighting for output containing JSON/YAML/TOML.

Usage

This script will expect you to have the text it will manipulate in your clipboard. When you run a command, it will do its job, and if it is successful, it will put the modified text back into your clipboard, as well as send it to stdout.

You can generally convert data with the following format:

poly <from_format> <to_format>[ options]

Any other generic command is simply

poly <command>[ options]

You can find some basic help from the --help option at any level:

poly --help
poly json --help
poly yaml --help
...etc

STDIN and Unix Pipes

If you would like to pipe input into poly you can use the -z/--use-stdin command. Any command in poly can use this and the input will be read from stdin instead of the clipboard, allowing full unix piping, e.e.g

echo "{ \"foo\": \"bar\" }" | poly -z json pretty

NOTE: Even when using -z/--use-stdin, the output will still be sent to the clipboard AND stdout.

Chat Copypasta

A slowly-expanding list of chat programs to copy/paste out of into a more sane a readable format (thanks, emoji reactions...)

The intention is for each command to support both the webapp and the desktop client for each of the chat programs (Yes, they copy differently. No, you shouldn't be surprised.)

Supported chat program(s):

• Slack (NOTE: CURRENTLY BROKEN AFTER SLACK UPDATED MESSAGE FORMAT)

Future support:

• Discord
• MS Teams

Conversions

All of the following formats convert between each other:

• JSON
• YAML
• TOML
• JWT
• URL Query String (see below for what this means)

NOTE: Some data types (like null in TOML) won't convert and might be dropped!

Additionally, you can convert between color formats:

• Hex (e.g. #123, #123456, #1234, #12345678)
• RGB (e.g. (10, 10, 10), (5,5,5))
• RGBA (e.g. (10, 10, 10, 10), (5,5,5,5))

JWT Conversion

Converting to JWT requires two additional options:

• -s, --secret: A secret string to encode/decode with
• -a, --algorithm: An algorithm to encode/decode with

URL Query String Type Conversion

When converting from a query string you can use the -c, --convert flag to tell poly to attempt to convert all the values in the query string. They all start as strings, but it will attempt to do things like convert "true" to true for JSON/YAML, etc. This only works for the basic data types; it will not do anything smart like nested objects/lists.

Example:

assuming your clipboard contains a=1&b=true&c=a,b,c...

poly query-string json --convert

will result in

{
  "a": 1,
  "b": true,
  "c": "a,b,c"   // note that this is NOT ["a", "b", "c"]
}

?foo=bar,baz,bat will be converted as a string of {"foo": "bar,baz,bat"}, not as a list of {"foo": ["bar", "baz", "bat"]} If you want a list to be built, simply use the same query param multiple times.

More complex example (including list and complex object):

assuming your clipboard contains

http://foo.bar.com?a=1&b=true&c=a,b,c&b=false&d={"foo":"bar"}

(note that this contains a url! oooooo....)

running:

poly query-string json --convert --include-url

will result in:

{
  "url": "http://foo.bar.com",  // from --include-url
  "a": 1,
  "b": [true, false],  // multiple 'b' params were combined into a list
  "c": "a,b,c",   // note that this is NOT ["a", "b", "c"]
  "d": {"foo": "bar"}   // oooooo fancy
}

This is all done using the Python builtin ast.literal_eval() -- a completely safe function that will attempt simply to convert the string to a valid Python literal, but does not execute the string as code.

JSON formatting (json)

Manipulate JSON data from the clipboard

All commands start with poly json

• pretty: pretty-prints the JSON in your clipboard and sends it back to the clipboard
• one-line: outputs the JSON in your clipboard as a single line of text and sends it back to the clipboard

Base64 (b64)

Encode/Decode Base64 data

• poly b64 from: Takes base64-encoded data from the clipboard, outputs the decoded data, and sends it back to the clipboard
• poly b64 to: Takes data from the clipboard, outputs base64-encoded data, and sends it back to the clipboard

Hash Functions

Supports md5, sha1, sha256, and sha512

URL Query Param Encoding/Decoding

• poly url encode
• poly url decode

Encodes strings like

a=1&b=true&c=a,b,c&b=false&d={"foo": "bar", "baz": "bat"}

into

a=1&b=true&b=false&c=a%2Cb%2Cc&d=%7B%22foo%22%3A%20%22bar%22%2C%20%22baz%22%3A%20%22bat%22%7D

and decodes them back again.

Both encode/decode also support -q, --quote-plus which allows for encoding spaces as + instead of %20

String Manipulation

• Line sorting (line-sort): This will attempt to sort the lines of a \n-separated string in your clipboard
• Spongebob (sponge, spongebob): I WoNDeR What ThIS doEs
• Smart Quotes (quotes): Replaces those stupid “/”/‘/’ with proper quotes "/'
• [Un]Escape Text (escape/unescape): Add/remove \ in a string for given characters
• Split Text (split): Split a string into multiple lines based on a given separator (default is ,)