Shortcut or button for copying posted code from Stack Overflow

I think a copy button in the corner of code blocks would be an excellent option:

A third-party browser plugin which provides similar functionality can be found at https://github.com/MrMino/StackCtrlC

Having a copy button means:

• I get all the text in the code block
• I don't have to click/drag the full length of the text
• Automatically copied to clipboard

I don't know why people would be against this small piece of added functionality. It makes sense to have a copy button. I certainly don't expect this comfort control to take priority but an official word on whether it will be considered would be nice.

Update & Alternative
I have learned that this functionality simply will not be implemented due to security concerns.

An alternative that I would not mind having would be an "Email me teh codez" button. One click, done! Now I have a somewhat permanent record of the code which I can organize in mail folders and copy at any time.

Simple and unobtrusive. ZeroClipboard and sytaxhighlighter both seem to do a nice job of abstracting the actual "copy to clipboard" code.

There are some cases in which all the code is in one line and is very long like answers to this post. These lines are hard to copy, and it would be nice to have a Copy code button.

I don't understand people's aversion to usability. (Looking over some of the Q&A on MSO, it seems like some people have an aversion to any kind of change.)

Code snippets don't have to be 1000+ lines to create a vertical scrollbar. Worse still are code snippets on one long line with a horizontal scrollbar. Those are a real pain to copy.

How can anything that makes things a little easier be a bad thing? Today, it should be fairly simple to implement in jQuery. SE already uses jQeury anyway. I think it's worth looking into.

I'd like to see the copy feature as well. I do more answering than questioning - and a lot of the PHP questions that I look at are written by newer users. They aren't familiar with the culture and have a tendency to post blocks of code followed by "what did I do wrong?" For these scenarios, it's often much easier to copy into an IDE and take a look at it the way I would look at my own code. (Especially if the lines extend past the codeblock width.)

SO shouldn't be a snippet site, but it is devoted to helping coders share knowledge. Such a feature facilitates that transaction.

I can't understand why people would object to taking one single click (to select all and copy) instead of many steps (as Shog9 suggested).

And w.r.t. Ether's answer, I don't think it matters how many lines of code you want to copy. I'd say it's particularly painful if there are only a few lines.

I've run into many sites with "copy code" button. phpBB has Select All.

I struggle with the same thing so I decided to create a browser extension that adds a copy to clipboard button on every code snippet.

It works with all StackExchange sites, including StackOverflow.

If you're interested, you can use it on Chrome or Firefox.

The source code is available on GitHub.

Select code block buttons.

H.B. on StackApps has written a script to do exactly this.

A user-installable script lets anyone who wants this feature have it without running afoul of any of the objections raised in other answers.

See also this question for some further discussion of similar tools.

The Stack Overflow Extras (SOX) userscript includes this feature, along with loads of other useful enhancements.

The setting is called "Add a button to code in posts to let you copy it".

Here's what it looks like:

Just click the button to save the code to your clipboard.

You'll need to install Tampermonkey (Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Opera Next, and Firefox) or Greasemonkey (Firefox) first (see above link for details).

I really would like this feature, and it would make it easy to test out code.

Like today, I wanted to copy the following:

If all those "selecting" and "clipboard" functions are not possible/secure, then what about a simple link to the raw content, just like GitHub does?

The "raw" button links to a new page that contains the code snippet as plain text. This allows to save or copy/paste it easily.

Disclaimer: I'm no UX expert ;)

The two people who said no, gave the following reasons:

• Security concern
• Ethically unpleasant

One alternative that would take care of both of them: override codeblock behaviour to select-all text within that codeblock when double-clicked.

This way, there is no additional button to be ethically unpleasant; and since you have to press CTRL+C manually, it is not a security concern.

If there is so much source code in a question that it is onerous to copy it, and especially that you feel a need to paste it all in your response, then both the questioner and you the answerer are doing things wrong. There is rarely a need for a huge amount of source, and you shouldn't have to repeat it in your response. If you do, I figure you deserve to go through a few extra steps to do so. It's not something we want to encourage.

Actually, I've created a chrome extension to solve exactly this problem. You can try it here.

Basically, whenever you double click a code snippet, it's automatically copied to your clipboard.

Considering all of the source code is wrapped around a <pre><code> block, I suspect it would be easy enough to write a Greasemonkey snippet to find those code blocks and copy them to the clipboard for you.

Or similarly, I've been using EverNote as of late and I've found that highlighting the code in a question/answer and then hitting CTRL+ALT+V will grab the selected text and put in into a new note entry for me. Then I can easily take it where I need it.

For now, use Click Copy {Code}. It's a Chrome extension that simplifies your workflow by copying the content of code blocks on any website with a double-click. Check out the project's source on GitHub: Click-Copy-Code.

Do you guys have a better way of copying large source posts?

One of my primary use cases is to download C++ code directly to a file so that I can compile it and try to reproduce the problem. So I wrote this simple one-liner to download code blocks from questions:

curl -sL https://stackoverflow.com/q/11227809/72178|xmllint --html --xpath "(//pre/code)[1]/text()" - 2>/dev/null|recode html..ascii

The code block number can be specified in square brackets in an XPath expression. For me I find this more useful than a "Copy" button. Here are examples of a one-liner in action for Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array?.

First code block:

[ ~]$ curl -sL https://stackoverflow.com/q/11227809/72178|xmllint --html --xpath "(//pre/code)[1]/text()" - 2>/dev/null|recode html..ascii
#include <algorithm>
#include <ctime>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    // Generate data
    const unsigned arraySize = 32768;
    int data[arraySize];

    for (unsigned c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c)
        data[c] = std::rand() % 256;

    // !!! With this, the next loop runs faster
    std::sort(data, data + arraySize);

    // Test
    clock_t start = clock();
    long long sum = 0;

    for (unsigned i = 0; i < 100000; ++i)
    {
        // Primary loop
        for (unsigned c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c)
        {
            if (data[c] >= 128)
                sum += data[c];
        }
    }

    double elapsedTime = static_cast<double>(clock() - start) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

    std::cout << elapsedTime << std::endl;
    std::cout << "sum = " << sum << std::endl;
}

Second code block:

[ ~]$ curl -sL https://stackoverflow.com/q/11227809/72178|xmllint --html --xpath "(//pre/code)[2]/text()" - 2>/dev/null|recode html..ascii
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Random;

public class Main
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        // Generate data
        int arraySize = 32768;
        int data[] = new int[arraySize];

        Random rnd = new Random(0);
        for (int c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c)
            data[c] = rnd.nextInt() % 256;

        // !!! With this, the next loop runs faster
        Arrays.sort(data);

        // Test
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        long sum = 0;

        for (int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i)
        {
            // Primary loop
            for (int c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c)
            {
                if (data[c] >= 128)
                    sum += data[c];
            }
        }

        System.out.println((System.nanoTime() - start) / 1000000000.0);
        System.out.println("sum = " + sum);
    }
}

• (Pick a useful web browser such as Firefox)
• Go to the code section of the post.
• Click left mouse button once at the start of the code.
• Release the mouse button. DO NOT drag the mouse cursor over the code while keeping the left mouse button pressed.
• Scroll down to end of the code using mouse scroll wheel, the page slider of the window of Page Down on your keyboard.
• Shift+click left mouse button once at the end of the code.
• Release the mouse button.
• Hit Ctrl+C on your keyboard.
• Done.

Just tried on a massive wall of code post as some sort of worse case scenario - it took me no more than 2 seconds to copy the whole code section. No add-ons or anything required.

What about something along the lines of how LaTeX-Community.org allow users to open code in writeLaTeX (an online collaborative LaTeX editor/compiler)? For details and examples of how it works, see the announcement:

http://latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=22340

This type of integration has been proposed for TeX SX, and with the recent integration of CircuitLabs into Electronics SX, it seems like there are some precedents (and models) for how this could work.

If you are struggling to select all of the code in a question/answer then the correct action is to EDIT THE POST to remove the extraneous code. There should never be so much code in a post as to pose a useability problem.

Adding auto-copy functionality will promote behemothic walls of crappy code that we simply do not want.

Nah. Jeff specifically said somewhere on his blog that SO was not for posting "huge swathes of code." And how.

What code blocks should be is 1. easy to highlight with the mouse and CTRL+C, which they are. As you can see:

Code code code
Oh more code

The other part is 2: when you paste it somewhere, annoying line numbers don't spill into your code which so far, doesn't happen.

I'd say SO has got codeblocks right, and they shouldn't be touched. I'd shudder if they ever look like the code blocks here.

I've always hated the "copy" button on sites that sites have, mostly for the reason if you can write to my clipboard, you also read it. And people don't usually like that. See the need for Flash to do this.

Do you guys have better way of copying large source post?

Edit -> Select all -> Copy -> Paste -> Edit out non-source portions.

But then, the only time I'm copying 1000+ line posts is to edit them anyway. That's really a bit much for SO...

This is a terrible idea

If you're answering a question

Have higher standards. The question should basically never have that much code in it in the first place. Learn to demand a proper minimal reproducible example and keep in mind that questions are about the problem, not the original code in which it was encountered.

OP is not supposed to just ask "about" the original code, but to ask a question motivated by a problem in that code. OP is also supposed to separate the original context from the question as much as makes sense, because questions are not about the people who ask nor those who answer. They're about building a reference, so that everyone can learn answers to questions by searching the site.

Code in your answer should be similarly short. Not only are you not getting paid to write it, you aren't even specifically volunteering to write it. You're volunteering to answer a question.

If you're "researching"

If your copy-paste of code into your own code base is mindless, then you are failing your duty of care as a programmer. A code snippet posted to answer someone else's question will hardly ever work in a vacuum without adaptation to its surroundings - and if it does, it should have been packaged up in a library instead.

A code snippet posted to answer your question is still one where you are responsible for understanding the code and the explanation given by the person who posted it. Stack Overflow is not a place for people to post code to fix and other people to fix it for the OP. That is completely counter to the spirit of the site and actively degrades its usefulness for everyone else. Please see the SO tour as well as Why should I help close "bad" questions that I think are valid, instead of helping the OP with an answer? and What is the point of closing questions for details and clarity, debugging details, needs more focus, or very low quality? for details.

If you're paying attention to the code and will put in the time to review it, then you should have plenty of time to copy and paste it manually. Or even to type it in manually.

If you're a beginner, manually typing in someone else's code - carefully, making sure you have it exact - is a useful exercise. You get to understand the structure of the code and develop the discipline to make all the brackets match up, etc. that a programming language demands.