The script works fantastically!

Unfortunately I still need FF when doing CSS - WebDev can't be beaten by WebKit's inspector yet.....

set the clipboard to (the clipboard as text)

what it's doing is simply stripping out the Rich Text representation that Safari is putting the clipboard (which screws up the tabular format), leaving only the plain text representation that Numbers & other apps are more likely to handle correctly.

At any rate, the following script (pasted into Script Editor, and saved as an Application) will clean up whatever table Safari put on the clipboard, and make it work better with Mac apps that accept tab-delimited text (such as Numbers, Excel, etc.):

set mydata to get the clipboard as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {(ASCII character 13) as text}
set mylines to text items of mydata
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {return}
set the clipboard to mylines as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}

Camino, Mozilla and Firefox all do as expected and copy from table with tabs and line breaks - Safari does not and is very annoying hence we use Camino as our day to day browser. Faster than them all and copies tables correctly.

End result is do not use Safari or switch to Camino etc when you ahve to copy a table. Will save you a shedload of time.

#!/bin/sh

pbpaste | perl -p -e 's/(\r|\n)/\r\t/gi' | perl -p -e 's/\r\t\r\t/\r/gi' | perl -p -e 's/\r\t/\t/gi' | pbcopy

I'm certain that someone better at Perl can rewrite this to be shorter. I wrote this one because I was copying Safari tables into a Windows XP device over RDC and pasting into BBEdit, executing the text factory, and copy/pasting into RDC, which was a pain. I have plugged the script into Quicksilver, so that the workflow is copy, QS command, then paste.

maybe i had firefox data in the clipboard and when i tried copying in safari i was hitting the wrong key. (most likely cmd+v, but i was definitely in safari).

my bad.

i'll try again, when i get back home.