[General Topics] Menneisyys:
As has been pointed out in all of my articles dedicated to the excellent, lightweight browser Opera Mini, in addition to the lack of italic characters, probably the biggest problem with it has always been the lack of support for copying text from a Web page.

Now, this is fixed. While the way I've enabled copying is certainly inferior to the excellent copy capabilities of Teashark (see THIS), it's certainly working and, at last, enables anyone to copy anything out of any Web page, regardless of the platform you use. Yeah, it IS revolutionary.

How it works? Pretty easy: I've created a Web application that you need to pass the address (the URL) of the page you'd like to copy contents from. After entering (copying) the address, it presents you the contents of the page in a text area, which is already copy-enabled; that is, you can copy anything from them to your device's clipboard.

As mobile devices, in general, are only able to handle small(er) chunks of text in a text area, the dialog you're presented uses 2000-char-long chunks of text. You can easily switch between the block you're reading by just clicking the appropriate block link (0, 1, 2 etc.) There's also a way to force the application to display the entire page at once; note that, with pages over 10-15 kilochars, this may result in Opera Mini's slowing to crawl. That is, use it if you're absolutely sure your particular model / operating system lets for putting larger texts in an editable text area.

Now, let's see how this all works in practice.

1. add the Web page http://menneisyys.s156.eatj.com to your favorites in Opera Mini (the easiest way of doing this is reading this article in Opera Mini and clicking the link)

2. when you're on a(nother) page you'd like to copy something from, copy the address of the page you'd like to copy text from to the clipboard of your device. This needs to be done in the following way:

a. on Windows Mobile Pocket PC's (but not touchscreen-less Smartphones, where you need an additional app for copying):

a-1: press #1 (if your phone has a hardware dialpad) or go to Menu (left softkey) / Enter Address

a-2: If you haven’t disabled the new auto-completion address input field (the Auto-complete address input checkbox in Settings), press Down and go to Insert symbol… by pressing Up; and select it; you’ll be taken to the address input field of your Java environment. (You’re taken straight here if you disable the new, Opera Mini-specific address input field.)

a-3: select Menu (right softkey) / Current Address

a-4: As you can see, the address of the current page is displayed. Just copy it: highlight it entirely (under Jbed, to do this, click Shift, Ctrl and, finally, the left arrow on the on-screen keyboard) and press Ctrl-C on the virtual keyboard.

b. on Blackberry phones:

b-1: press #1 (if your phone has a hardware dialpad) or go to Menu / Enter Address

b-2: If you haven’t disabled the new auto-completion address input field (the Auto-complete address input checkbox in Settings), roll the trackball down, and, then, up, until you get to Insert symbol…. Now, you'll be taken to the address input field of your Java environment. (You’re taken straight here if you disable the new, Opera Mini-specific address input field.)

b-3: press the Shift button and roll the trackball down until the entire (current) address is selected

b-4: press Menu and select the (default) Copy.

b-5: to exit this dialog, press Back twice.

3. now that you've copied the address of the current page, switch to the previously (in bullet 1) stored page. When it loads, copy the URL of the previous page (the one you'd like to copy text from) to the "Enter the URL to convert" textfield. To do this, start editing the field and,

- on Blackberries, press the hardware Menu button and go down to Paste.

- on Windows Mobile devices, bring up the virtual keyboard and click Ctl, and, then, V

- on Symbian devices, long-press the Pen button until "Paste" is shown over the right softkey. Not releasing the Pen button, press the right softkey.

After some conversion, a new page is displayed, with a huge text area displaying the textual contents of the Web page. If the contents of the page is longer than 2000 characters, only the first 2000 is displayed (not to overburden the phone) and you can select the later ones by clicking 1, 2, ... n at the top of the page. You can also make the system display the entire content entirely, without cutting it in chunks, by clicking the "Click here to see the entire page!" link. Again, use this feature with caution - again, your phone may slow to a crawl, if the midlet manager's text area component is able to edit so huge blocks of text at all).

Finally, if you absolutely don't see anything and/or you'd like to see the entire markup of the page, click "Click this to switch to tag-enabled mode if you don't see anything".

After you've stepped into editing the text area displaying the (given chunk of) text, just look for the expression / URL etc. to copy to the clipboard. Once you've found it, highlight it and copy to the clipboard. This operation is supported on all the major smartphone operating systems and done in the same way as copying the address of the current page to the clipboard.

Hosting

Currently, the converter is hosted on a free JSP server that needs to be manually restarted every six hour (to force people to purchase a real Web package). That is, when you do check it out, it might not work at all. I will surely move it to another page / service provider if I don't find anyone else to voluntarily host it, depending on the price / conditions. (Currently, I don't really need a JSP/PHP-capable Webpage and, consequently, I've only subscribed to a static one for my database/picture/file back-end at http://www.winmobiletech.com/ ; this is why I can't currently host it myself.)

If you have the bandwidth and you'd like to help Opera Mini users, feel free to host the files yourself. If you have a JSP engine (Tomcat et al.), you'll find the web application (WAR) file HERE. If you only have a PHP or ASP engine, and don't want to struggle with porting the Java app into PHP or ASP, let me know and I convert it instead.

Source

The source of my converter is really-really small. The two, related files HERE and HERE, should you want to know how it works. The first is the main "landing" page you need to paste the URL to paste text from (it's a static HTML page as there is no need for any dynamic content in it); the second is the actual JSP page doing the work.