thirdspacemusic wrote:
I have pasted in some text copied from a post in a message board app (in this case NextDoor - but not sure this is relevant as no other message on that board looks like this one), and wish to remove the formatting. But I cannot. Nor can I change the formatting - the font, italics, etc. The usual options (Shift+Option+Command+V into Pages for example) do not work. I have also tried pasting it into a Plain Text doc in TextEdit, but same result. I will paste some here so you can see what I am dealing with:
๐๐ ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ'๐ซ๐ ๐ข๐ง๐ญ๐๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐, ๐ก๐ ๐ข๐ฌ ๐ฅ๐จ๐จ๐ค๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐จ๐ซ ๐ฌ๐จ๐ฆ๐๐จ๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ญ๐๐ค๐ ๐ก๐ข๐ฌ ๐ฉ๐ฅ๐๐๐.
Any help you can offer will be welcome, thanks
When you perform a copy operation, it copies multiple versions of your content, from the most rich in styles down to the plainest version. Then, when you paste, it will paste the richest version that it can find. So if you are trying to strip the formatting, the system is usually going to be working against you. This can be quite challenging.
You were on the right track trying plain text in TextEdit. Sadly, TextEdit just isn't up the job. Even if you use the plain text option, TextEdit appears to totally ignore that if you paste in rich text like this. Nice.
A better text-only editor is BBEdit. That being said, BBEdit, while better, also fails with the text you quoted. So I tried my own app that I wrote years ago, and that, too fails.
The answer here is that "NextDoor" app is doing something extremely unusual. It appears to be using some kind of obscure Unicode alternate characters that look like ASCII text, but are actually closer to complex emojis. I've never seen anything like that. Of course, Unicode has many thousands of characters. But to think that someone went out of their way to prevent extracting the content is really creepy.
For example, here's what your text looks like in a low-level, binary hex editor:
As you can see, there's no text there. This is what a text file should look like:
