Paste Unformated Text dialog does not appear

[gcb1]

This is a follow up on Why i cannot paste negative numbers?

There, I learned that the only way to paste numbers using different locale’s decimal separators, into the locale i want to keep in my document, is to paste the data with ctrl+alt+shift+v (edit > paste special > paste unformated text).

BUT, that works fine if i have 2 or more lines in my clipboard. If i have a single value, it just gets pasted as text, without any of the special transformations that i get when my clipboard have 2 or more lines.

Why is that? And more importantly, how can I get the dialog (or the dialog’s effect) when pasting a single line?

[mikekaganski]

@gcb1

Why is that?

Because people ask for that They mostly consider the single-value paste to not require the dialog. That case was excluded explicitly.

@gcb1

how can I get the dialog (or the dialog’s effect) when pasting a single line?

If you do a Edit → Paste Special → Paste Special (Ctrl+Shift+V) for an external data (it would be different for a copy from Calc), you would get this dialog:

It shows, that the “text import dialog box” is a separate option. And indeed, Tools → Customize allows to find that command, and put it to a toolbar / menu / assign a shortcut, as you please

[gcb1]

thanks! i use ctrl+shift+v so much for pasting actual text without formatting, that i’m ashamed i have never seen the “dialog box” option there!

Because people ask for that

I wonder if it was the opposite. cltr+shift+alt+v was added as a faster ctrl+shift+v+select-unformatter-text. And then the dialog added later for 2+ lines? I guess your suggestion Ctrl+shit+v+import-dialog, is the “right thing” here, and ctrl+alt+shift+v with 2+ lines in the clipboard is the “happy accident” of a feature mostly intended to split text into rows, that I was using to convert to number because it’s the same dialog. (but which understandably breaks in cases of single line in clipboard)

[mikekaganski]

@gcb1

I wonder

Shrug - it’s all in the git log.
In a fix for i#15509 (commit 595adc733bf9868aa022fad89cae17ec8f71d9ad, 2006) the support for CSV in clipboard was introduced; then it was showing the dialog for both cases when there was a newline, and when in a single line there were “usual” separators. I.e., if you pasted a single line with, say, commas, the dialog was shown.

But then there appeared i#74225 (2007) about annoying dialog; and it was fixed in commit 5eb42cd4da3389e56cb435bf38c78fd8cad0ef95 (2008), which explicitly removed the ability to show the dialog in single-line cases.

[gcb1]

will you quit ruining my misplaced faith in humanity?!

edit: reading further

n-line hack added because there’s no way to differentiate paste and special paste