Is there a way to facilitate the copy&paste process for code samples?

Question

Code samples are easy enough to recognise, but I wonder if there is a more convenient way to copy all contents of a gray sample box into the clipboard for pasting into Mathematica.

Right now I select all content in a given cell with the mouse (which can get fiddly for long scrollable cells)...

... but I´d very much like a StackExchange interface element/widget that either marks all content or - even better - pastes this into the clipboard.

Something like in this, where the blue circle can be clicked and marks or copies the contents:

For direct import of whole answers into Mathematica, a number of nifty Mathematica-based solutions were already proposed, but I find myself doing the whole paste&copy thing over and over, not least because sometimes you only want to try out a code segment and not the whole thing.

Answer 1

Well, I have come up with something slightly different. Please tell me what you think about it and I'll elaborate on it.

The basic idea is the following. Below you see a picture with some code in it (a piece of mr.wizard's code from here). It's apparently an inert picture and normally you couldn't do much with it, but in this case there is something special going on. If you paste its hyperlink in the following Mathematica code (I've done that already in this example) you will get a cell with the code itself, ready to be executed.

picLink = "https://i.stack.imgur.com/79TZu.gif"; 
importImage = Import[picLink, { "ImageList", 2}];
imdata = Flatten@ImageData[importImage, "Byte"][[All, All, 1]];
imdata = imdata[[3 ;; imdata[[1 ;; 2]].{1, 256} + 2]];
CellPrint@Uncompress[StringJoin @@ FromCharacterCode@imdata]

Of course, this can be easily wrapped into a palette. In this example, picture and code are the same, but that isn't really necessary.

UPDATE
Another useful application of this technique is that you can abuse it to add attachments to posts. As an example: Executing the following single line of Mathematica code will give you a demo notebook of 31 pages (solely contained in the bar picture below):

NotebookPut@ImportString[Uncompress[
    StringJoin @@ FromCharacterCode@#[[3 ;; #[[1 ;; 2]].{1, 256} + 2]] &[
     Flatten@ImageData[Import["https://i.stack.imgur.com/hhoNE.gif"],
         "Byte"][[All, All, 1]]]], "NB"];

Answer 2

Just a test we are doing with Sjoerd. Will delete it later

Sjoerd: try this:

(* Generate encoding image for THIS*)
i1 = Image[{Partition[#, 3, 3, 1, 0] &@
     ToCharacterCode@Compress@ExportString[NotebookGet@InputNotebook[], "NB"]/256}];
(*Clone Notebook *)
NotebookPut@ImportString[Uncompress@FromCharacterCode@TakeWhile[
                                   Flatten@ImageData[i1, "Byte"] , # != 0 &], "NB"]

Here is the (Framed) image :)

Verde: this can be much shorter. In the 1D case, Partition doesn't need to pad, and you don't have to test for padding. I also don't like the division. Let's keep it in bytes.

(*Generate encoding image for THIS*)
i1 = Image[{Partition[#, 3, 3] &@
     ToCharacterCode@Compress@ExportString[NotebookGet@InputNotebook[], "NB"]},"Byte"];
(*Clone Notebook*)
NotebookPut@
 ImportString[Uncompress@FromCharacterCode@Flatten@ImageData[i1, "Byte"], "NB"]

Saving as PNG instead of required now.

Answer 3

This has been suggested on Meta Stack Overflow, but it looks like it is an unpopular suggestion, presumably because StackOverflow regulars generally don't approve of copy/paste or including large chunks of code. On our site, I think copy/paste for testing, evaluation, timing, saving as code snippet, etc, would justify this addition, and, as an iPad user, I'd welcome it too (because copy paste on iPad isn't always infallible on web pages.

Answer 4

I know this question is old, but Sjoerd brought it to my attention. I have mentioned a very nice solution to this problem in my What is your mathematica.stackexchange toolbag? question.

When I try example code that was given by a poster, the Select Code Block user-script is extremely helpful. When you hover a code-block, then a button appears which let's you select all code instantly. Since the above link doesn't have a downloadable version, you can use the selectCodeBlock.js from my GitHub page.