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I'm looking for a tool that surely must exist somewhere...

There's a dropdown list on a webpage with numerous values in it. I simply want to copy these values into the Windows clipboard and paste them into a text editor with one value per line.

Am aware this can be done using Firebug followed by a bit of complex search-and-replacing or alternatively perhaps a few lines of Javascript but there must surely be an easier way using a couple of clicks of the mouse. Don't want to reinvent the wheel!

Has anyone come across a Firefox Extension, Greasemonkey User Script or similar that already does this?

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I don't know about a script, and it may be a bit more work than you're interested in, but you can select the object and hit "Inspect Element" which will tell you where the dropdown is in the code. Then, right click on the "select" area that is the dropdown, and hit "copy as HTML". Then you can paste it to a text editor of your choice. It will require some manual cleanup.

This is by no means an optimal solution. But it is the best I have at hand.

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  • Yes - that was the kind of thing I meant by "using Firebug followed by a bit of complex search-and-replacing". The search-and-replacing ain't trivial but I've just worked out it can be done using the following regular expression in Notepad++: \s*</?option.*?> Bit fiddly but the best I've got so far so thanks.
    – Steve Chambers
    Mar 26, 2013 at 15:29
  • I know it is, bu no means an optimal answer. But since I have plenty of time on my hands, sometimes the sub-optimal solutions are "enough". Would be nice to have something more integrated. But, then I'd probably rarely use it, making it something that might not be worth the time to install it.
    – killermist
    Mar 26, 2013 at 15:34
  • +1. I don't think there is faster solution. Actually "inspect element", copy HTML, then replace the html tags with empty string => effectively leaving only the values requires less than a minute.
    – Mariyan
    Mar 26, 2013 at 17:28
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    Less than a minute's good and the best I've got so far...still think a few seconds would be better.
    – Steve Chambers
    Mar 27, 2013 at 20:56
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There is a free add-on for Google Chrome that serves exactly this purpose.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-html-list-options/amoeofpgnollolnonakakmiehlanaocl/related

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  • Works quite well. Right-click anywhere on the page, select "Export HTML List Options" -> "Displayed Text" then scroll down to the relevant dropdown and select / copy the text. (I couldn't immediately see a way of narrowing the results down to a single dropdown.)
    – Steve Chambers
    Nov 10, 2016 at 8:45
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    "The requested URL was not found on this server."
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Jan 15, 2021 at 5:15
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For anyone who stumbles across this problem, you can right click on the dropdown, and Inspect Element. Right click on the selector and choose "copy inner html". Open up Microsoft Word and paste your contents in. Select All and Go to Table -> Convert -> Convert Text-to-table (or Insert -> Table ->Convert Text-to-table). 3 Columns, and choose " as the delimiter - this will give you the option value in its own column. Select the column with your text, paste into a new Word doc, then go to Table -> Convert -> Convert Table to text (or Layout -> convert table to text). Separate Text with Paragraph Marks worked for me.

You can mess around with it if you need the actual dropdown text- it just takes some extra steps if your delimiter is different.

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