iOS 11 Double Copying
There are some weird things going on with iOS’s Copy item in the Share Sheet. I made a short Workflow to get around a problem I’ve been having with it when trying to share the URL of a Washington Post story.
I mentioned the problem on Twitter a few weeks ago: I’m reading an article in the WaPo app that I want to link to. I bring up the Share Sheet, tap Copy, and switch to some other app I want to paste the URL into. Could be Drafts, Notes, Slack, Textastic—whatever. I then paste the URL and wait to see what happens. Depending on the app, I might get exactly what I expect (Notes and Textastic), or I might get a doubled version of the URL (Drafts and Slack).
I’ve seen this, too, copying from other apps. I wonder what’s causing this.
Update (2018-01-01): Dr. Drang:
Armed with these two bits of information, I started exploring and quickly confirmed that the text manipulation action in my workflow—the regex substitution that eliminates the superfluous URL—was unnecessary.
In fact, it wasn’t doing anything at all because the URL it was being fed wasn’t doubled.
Some apps add the URL in multiple places in the drag data (e.g. to text flavors, to use old terminology I like better :-) as this was apparently necessary at some point — particularly among some of the built-in apps — in order to not lose the URL being shared, but most of the apps have fixed it in the meantime and therefore incorporate the URL both as part of the text and independently.