This is a quick and simplified python 3.x rewrite of James Bach's original PerlClip tool which generates a counterstring with a length of your choosing. For those unfamiliar with the concept when you look at a counterstring it's easy to determine the character position by virtue of the markers.
It can come in very handing when testing text fields where the strings may be truncated but you can still tell how many characters are in the string.
James's original tool, perlclip can be found here, along with a counterstring blog post here.
This was written with python 3.7.2, so you'll need to ensure that you have that (or a later version) installed. For more information on installing python, refer to python.org
Once you have python installed and have a virtualenv of your choice activated (optional), then you can simply pip install directly from github by running:
pip install git+https://github.com/deefex/pyclip.git
Or, if you prefer you can clone the repository and pip install locally:
git clone https://github.com/deefex/pyclippip install ./pyclip
Once this completes, you should be good to go.
The reason for 'pip installing' above was eliminate the pain of running python locally.
No need to remember where the cloned directory is, which script to run, or the mandatory 'python' prefix.
All you need to do is type:
pyclip [length]
on the command line, and that's it, after which the counterstring will be automatically copied to your clipboard, ready to paste into whatever you need.
The length parameter will default to 1000 if not supplied. It needs to be an integer and greater than 0.
pyclip- Generates a counterstring with length 1000pyclip 10- Generates a counterstring with length 10
The marker element (*) of the counterstring marks the position of the preceding number:
*3*5*7*10*is a counterstring of length 102*4*6*8*11*is a counterstring of length 112*4*6*8*11*14*17*20*23*26*29*32*35*is a counterstring of length 35
Have fun!