Sometimes you need to test a text field or document with different kinds of stressful inputs. But, it can be a pain to prepare the text data. PerlClip is a tool that helps you do that. PerlClip places prepared text into the Windows clipboard so you can paste it wherever you need it.

You can run the Perl script, or click on the EXE version (a DOS console window appears when you do that). Enter the text pattern you want to produce. You can enter the following things:

• Any Perl code, such as the following:

  "james" produces james

  "james" x 5 produces jamesjamesjamesjamesjames

  "a" x (2 ** 16) produces a string of "a" 2 to the 16th power (65536) in length

  chr(13) x 10 produces ten carriage returns

  "X" x 1000000 produces a string of one million X's

• $allchars produces a string that includes all character codes from 1 to 255 (0 not included).
  
• counterstring {num} [{char}] produces a special string of length {num} that counts its own characters.

  "counterstring 10" would produce "*3*5*7*10*" which is a ten-character long string, such that each asterisk is at a position in the string equal to the number that precedes it.

  This is useful for pasting into fields that cut off text, so that you can tell how many characters were actually pasted. You can specify a separator other than asterisk. "counterstring 15 A" would produce "A3A5A7A9A12A15A"

• textfile {name} loads the contents of a specified text file into the clipboard.
  
  

When you see the "Ready to Paste!" message, the clipboard is prepared.