Sunday, July 26, 2015

Copying and pasting table contents into comments in social networks and discussion forums

There isn't much sense in posting whole contents of tables into a comment under a post in most social networks, because directly copied-and-pasted content becomes plaintext, data is misplaced and garbled, because the comment and display area are not wide enough, and the intended overview becomes non-sensical anyway.

One can also choose to copy and paste only the first two columns, by holding down the Ctrl key in Firefox and dragging the mouse cursor across the cells with actual data starting from the ranking.

The data should first and foremost be pasted into a text editor, all the unnecessary data removed, and then copied and pasted here:
Top 10 countries by PEV market share of total new car sales in 2014 and 2013
^ Copied and pasted separately
# Country 2013 2014
1 Norway 13.84% 6.10%
2 Netherlands 3.87% 5.55%
3 Iceland 2.71% 0.94%
4 Estonia 1.57% 0.73%
5 Sweden 1.53% 0.71%
6 Japan 1.06% 0.91%
7 Denmark 0.88% 0.29%
8 Switzerland 0.75% 0.44%
9 United States 0.72% 0.60%
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country#Top_10_countries

The result looks much nicer, but is still relatively unwieldy, because of variable-width fonts used by most social networking sites.

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