Copying and Pasting a Table into Text Editor produces mangled text

• Component: HTML Editing
• Status: NEW ---

[Elliott Sprehn]

Copying a table (such as the search results from bugs.webkit.org) into TextWrangler or the example application that comes with XCode called SimpleText ( /Developer/Examples/Carbon/SimpleText ) generates mangled text.

Instead of the data being separated by tabs its broken across many lines as if both the row separators and  the column separators were replaced with new lines.

If pasting into a TextEdit or other editors the table appears properly formatted as tab separated data with one line per row.

Reproducable with Safari 2.0.4 and the current nightly.

[Elliott Sprehn]

Created attachment 13856 [details]
Unmangled output from TextEdit.app

[Elliott Sprehn]

Created attachment 13857 [details]
Mangled Output from TextWrangler.app, also occurs in SimpleText.app example

[Andrey Tverdokhleb]

Devs!? Anybody?! 
The bug is really old - Safari always worked this way and it was always a problem to copy/paste an html table to Excel from WebKit based applications. Now Apple has it's own spreadsheet Numbers, but it has exactly same problem. Please fix this - makes it really hard to use Safari for those of us who needs to cut data from web! I mean - REALLY HARD!
BTW - Firefox, Camino, IE all behave properly in this case. 

[Justin Garcia]

Please attach a link to the bugs.webkit.org query where this reproduces.  This query:

http://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&priority=P1&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=substring&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailcc2=1&emailtype2=substring&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Bug+Number&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=

Works when pasting into TextMate, which accepts plaintext only, which I assume is what SimpleText and TextWrangler are doing.

[Andrey Tverdokhleb]

Ok, apparently it behaves depending on sites and application you pasting to.
F.e. this table 

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/ 

when copied from Safari and pasted to Numbers looks like a single column table, 
but when I copy/paste it from Camino it looks right in Numbers.  
Works ok with plain text apps though.

In plain text applications some tables look right when pasted from Safari and some don't. F.e.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS07-003.mspx?pf=true

Any table from this link pastes improperly to both plain text apps and Numbers apps.

[Andrey Tverdokhleb]

Safari 3.0.3 (522.12.1)

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

<rdar://problem/5400981>

[Justin Garcia]

I copied http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/ and tried pasting it into Numbers.  I made a change to WebCore to keep it from putting RTF on the pasteboard and the problem went away.  So, Numbers seems to prefer RTF, but it doesn't understand RTF tables.  Either that or RTF tables are malformed.  Asking the AppKit folks about this...

[Jon@Chromium]

You can repro this problem by copying from Google Spreadsheets into Excel or OpenOffice Calc.  IE7 and FF3 are able to copy and paste successfully.  

Also reported against Chromium.  See bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3827