Question

In visual studio I want a macro that takes the selected text, pipes it to a dos command, captures the resulting stream and replaces the selected text with it.

Something like this…

Dim objSel As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection
objSel.Text = RunShellCommand("beautify.rb", objSel.Text)

..where I don’t know how to implement RunShellCommand.

It seems Shell("beautify.rb", 1) would execute a command and return the output, in which case all I need is .. “How do you stream text to the shell command?”

Answer 1

I have a work around using AutoHotKey (an excellent tool) and changing beautify.rb to take a file.

;window ctrl R  - beautify sql
#^R::
ClipSaved := ClipboardAll   
clipboard = ; Start off empty to allow ClipWait to detect when the text has arrived.
Send ^c
ClipWait  ; Wait for the clipboard to contain text.
FileDelete , c:\tmp\tmp_ahk_clip.txt
FileAppend , %clipboard% , c:\tmp\tmp_ahk_clip.txt
RunWait, %comspec% /c ""C:\...\Database\beautify.rb" c:\tmp\tmp_ahk_clip.txt > c:\tmp\tmp_ahk_clip_out.txt" ,,Hide
FileRead, clipboard, c:\tmp\tmp_ahk_clip_out.txt
Send ^v
Clipboard := ClipSaved 
ClipSaved = ; Free the memory 
return 

Now any text field in any app with sql in it can be beautiful 🙂