AppleScript bug: When placing plain text on the clipboard, the text is always converted to rich text

Question

Run the following code to put some text on your clipboard:

set testString to "This string should be plain text."
set the clipboard to testString

If you open up a new .rtf file in TextEdit.app, and paste the clipboard into this document, you will observe that the clipboard contains rich text. Specifically, the clipboard text is of the font Helvetica and size 12.

I also tried specifying set the clipboard to (testString as string) or set the clipboard to (testString as text). But, the code always puts rich text on the clipboard. This rich text is always of the same style (as described in the previous paragraph).

Is it possible to put text on the clipboard, as plain text, in AppleScript?

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_{OS X El Capitan, version 10.11.6.}

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Answer 1

Maybe copying the text to the Pasteboard using Cocoa-AppleScript will only set plain text to paste to the RTF document.

Otherwise, use the following as a workaround:

set testString to "This string should be plain text." as string
do shell script "pbcopy <<<" & quoted form of testString

The previous mentioned workaround method adds a linefeed after testString to the Clipboard and if that's unwanted behavior, use:

set testString to "This string should be plain text." as string
do shell script "printf " & the quoted form of testString & " | pbcopy"

The other option is to use Paste and Match Style ⌥⇧⌘V instead of Paste ⌘V to match what's at the insertion point.

Answer 2

This should work:

set the clipboard to string of (the clipboard as record)

In fact, you can safety-proof it using a try statement:

try
  set the clipboard to string of (the clipboard as record)
on error errMsg
  display dialog errMsg
end try

Answer 3

It looks like no matter what you do, if you have plain text selected in your new document tab in your text edit preferences, your clipboard will paste plain text. However if you have rich text enabled, it looks as if everything will be pasted as rich text in a rtf document.

I also tried selecting the text in the RTF document and tried to convert to plaintext In the format menu. A dialog window popped up saying that the document would be converted from RTF to plain text If I chose to format the text