Looks like Clipboard Save Text has 64K Limit

[nevada]

It appears that save clipboard to a text file saves only 64K of the clipboard and you find about it when someone's data disappears.

 

This limit shouldn't exit. It sounds like something from DOS.

 

The help file doesn't say anything about a limit.

 

It is easy to workaround it by opening wordpad and saving the document as a text file from there. But that means I slow down 99,9 exections of a macro for one unusual case that may not occur again.

[Cory]

So did you have a question? I didn’t see any stated but let me take a stab at what you might be asking since I’m guessing you’re not just here to complain.

 

There is no 64k limit of ME with regards to the Windows Clipboard. I routinely copy huge amounts of data to the clipboard and into vars in ME from a large variety of apps and I have never had a problem. To check I just created a 128KB notepad file of random text, copied it to the clipboard, copied the clipboard to a text var and wrote that text var to a file and it all came out intact. There must be something else wrong with your system.

 

But you piqued my interest so I looked online and I could find no documented limit to the clipboard. But I am pretty sure in Windows 3.1 there was a 32 or 64KB limit. But I don’t think ME will even run in 3.1. What version of Windows are you using. The only thing I could find were physical memory limits. That is your clipboard size is limited to the amount of available physical memory. So if you only have 64K worth of RAM left that’s your limit. How are your system resources?

 

I did see some posts from folks on the Usenet where they were seeing a limit but it had something to do with the program they were copying from, not the Windows clipboard. You might try reproducing my steps above and see if things work the same for you. In either case if you could give us the steps you took to come to this conclusion in detail I would be happy to try and reproduce it on my system to help you TS. Make sure to tell us what applications are involved, what OS, version of ME and all relevant info. And if we can't help you then it might be time to start a support incident with ISS.

 

In any case I can tell you without a doubt ME does handle clipboards larger than 64KB.

[kevin]

When you brought this issue to our attention in May of 2005 (Looks Like Save Clipboard To Text Has 64 K Limit, Macro only saved 64 K of 267 K Clipboard) I said:

The Clipboard Save Text command works fine in Windows XP. On Windows 98 only the first 64K of the clipboard is saved. This limitation also exists for the Variable Set String %T1% from Clipboard command. We will add a note to the documentation describing this.

and

We have confirmed that this limitation exists in Windows 98, Me, and 95. While the underlying cause is with Windows itself, we have identified a possible workaround that may fix this. We will be looking at this for a future release of Macro Express. In the meantime, we will update the documentation to include a warning.

Our research indicated that this limitation is being caused by Windows 98, Me and 95. We have not yet been able to fix this issue.

 

You are correct, the documentation has not been updated to reflect this limitation. We apologize for the oversight. It will be updated for the next version of Macro Express.

[Cory]

But Kevin, isn’t it a limitation of Windows 9X and not a limitation of ME?

[kevin]

As I said

Our research indicated that this limitation is being caused by Windows 98, Me and 95.

At one point we thought we would be able to find a fix but we have not been able to so far.

[MILESCFA]

As I said

At one point we thought we would be able to find a fix but we have not been able to so far.

 

The limitation is in MSFT's clipboard, I think. From Excel help ("Troubleshoot collecting and pasting"):

=================================================================

I can't add additional items to the Microsoft Office Clipboard.

 

There are already 24 items on the Microsoft Office Clipboard If you copy more than 24 items, the Office Clipboard will delete the first item copied and then collect the 25th item. Collected items remain on the Office Clipboard until you close all Office programs running on your computer. To begin copying items again, delete some items or click Clear All on the Office Clipboard.

There are large items on the Office Clipboard The Office Clipboard may stop adding items— even if there are fewer than 24— if you copy large items to it. The Office Clipboard can contain up to 4 megabytes (MB) of data if system RAM is less than 64 MB, or 8 MB if system RAM is 64 MB or greater. To begin copying items again, delete some items or click Clear All on the Office Clipboard. If a single item is larger than 4 MB or 8 MB, you cannot copy the item to the Office Clipboard.

 

You are attempting to copy an item with an unsupported format There are some items that cannot be copied to the Office Clipboard because the format is not supported.

=================================================================

(special formating is my emphasis).

 

I'm trying to copy into an Excel spreadsheet from a web page that has embedded images in it. While the text data is not that much (pastespecial-UnicodeText and memory is not a problem), trying to paste-html bombs ("Microsoft Office Excel cannot paste the data.") because of these stupid "pics".