[Pharo-users] Using Playgrounds as a notepad

I often find that I need to do simple manipulations to passages of text, e.g. remove all carriage returns, or extract email addresses etc. Pasting the text into a Playground doesn't work because there is always an apostrophe, or line break or... etc. and the playground complains. Is there a way to tell a Playground to just ignore the text, and give me a handle to its contents, so that I can then do something like playgroundId contents splitOn:Character space. Alternatively, is there another object that would be more appropriate? Playground would be really useful just because it is in the menu, and always available. Cheers Andy