fetch clipboard text and remove hyphens

Question

I'm running Mac OS 10.9 and I use the Text to Speech feature which allows you to use a hotkey that reads selected text in any application. I use this feature for reading out-loud PDF documents in Preview (Apple's PDF viewer).

The problem is that the selected text usually has word-break hyphens. The result is the Text to Speech feature doesn't read out the text properly.

Example:

Question:

Can you write me a short bash shell script that removes hyphens from the text in the clipboard? I will use automator too, so I can assign a hotkey, and to send the script's output to the Speak Text feature.

Edit: (in reply to goldilocks's comment) Automator allows me to copy selected text to the clipboard followed by a shell script followed by the Speak Text feature. See image below.

2nd Edit: in fact there might be a more concise way of accomplishing this:

under the 'Pass input' option there is a 'as argument' option. I'm not sure whether this means I can skip the 'copy to clipboard' action in the first image, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

Answer 1

On Linux the following would work:

xsel | sed ':rep /-$/ {N; s/-\n//; b rep}' | xsel -i

On OSX I am largely guessing (although the sed script should work ok). pbcopy seems to the the command to use. Assuming there is a selection buffer on OSX and pbcopy works from it by default, this might work:

pbpaste | sed ':rep /-$/ {N; s/-\n//; b rep}' | pbcopy

Looking at the online man page, it seems there are a number of 'pasteboards' that it can work with:

-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}
       specifies which pasteboard to copy to or paste from.  If no pasteboard is
       given,  the  general pasteboard will be used by default.

I have no idea which one (if any) is the one you want and I can't see any further documentation (although I haven't looked too deep). You could experiment with pbpaste -pboard xxx and see what comes out. There is a good chance one is for highlighted text while the other is for text copied with Cmd-C. Given a working option, you would just add it to both pbpaste and pbcopy.

The other thing that may go wrong is that pbcopy has issues reading and writing to the same pasteboard in at the same time. The simplest solution would be to use a non standard Unix utility called sponge. It is part of moreutils. Again Linux-centrically:

pbpaste | sed ':rep /-$/ {N; s/-\n//; b rep}' | sponge | pbcopy

Otherwise use a variable:

selection=$(pbpaste | sed ':rep /-$/ {N; s/-\n//; b rep}')
echo "$selection" | pbcopy

Update

Assuming Automator uses the stdout of the shell script, you would just select the to stdin option (this is where the data arrives if it is piped to the script). The the shell script would simply be:

#!/bin/sh
sed ':rep /-$/ {N; s/-\n//; b rep}'