How do I copy to the clipboard in JavaScript?
Overview
There are three primary browser APIs for copying to the clipboard:
Async Clipboard API
[navigator.clipboard.writeText]
- Text-focused portion available in Chrome 66 (March 2018)
- Access is asynchronous and uses JavaScript Promises, can be written so security user prompts (if displayed) don't interrupt the JavaScript in the page.
- Text can be copied to the clipboard directly from a variable.
- Only supported on pages served over HTTPS.
- In Chrome 66 pages inactive tabs can write to the clipboard without a permissions prompt.
document.execCommand('copy')
(deprecated) /p>- Most browsers support this as of ~April 2015 (see Browser Support below).
- Access is synchronous, i.e. stops JavaScript in the page until complete including displaying and user interacting with any security prompts.
- Text is read from the DOM and placed on the clipboard.
- During testing ~April 2015 only Internet Explorer was noted as displaying permissions prompts whilst writing to the clipboard.
Overriding the copy event
- See Clipboard API documentation on Overriding the copy event.
- Allows you to modify what appears on the clipboard from any copy event, can include other formats of data other than plain text.
- Not covered here as it doesn't directly answer the question.
General development notes
Don't expect clipboard related commands to work whilst you are testing code in the console. Generally, the page is required to be active (Async Clipboard API) or requires user interaction (e.g. a user click) to allow (document.execCommand('copy')
) to access the clipboard see below for more detail.
IMPORTANT (noted here 2020/02/20)
Note that since this post was originally written deprecation of permissions in cross-origin IFRAMEs and other IFRAME "sandboxing" prevents the embedded demos "Run code snippet" buttons and "codepen.io example" from working in some browsers (including Chrome and Microsoft Edge).
To develop create your own web page, serve that page over an HTTPS connection to test and develop against.
Here is a test/demo page which demonstrates the code working:
https://deanmarktaylor.github.io/clipboard-test/
Async + Fallback
Due to the level of browser support for the new Async Clipboard API, you will likely want to fall back to the document.execCommand('copy')
method to get good browser coverage.
Here is a simple example (may not work embedded in this site, read "important" note above):
function fallbackCopyTextToClipboard(text) {
var textArea = document.createElement("textarea");
textArea.value = text;
// Avoid scrolling to bottom
textArea.style.top = "0";
textArea.style.left = "0";
textArea.style.position = "fixed";
document.body.appendChild(textArea);
textArea.focus();
textArea.select();
try {
var successful = document.execCommand('copy');
var msg = successful ? 'successful' : 'unsuccessful';
console.log('Fallback: Copying text command was ' + msg);
} catch (err) {
console.error('Fallback: Oops, unable to copy', err);
}
document.body.removeChild(textArea);
}
function copyTextToClipboard(text) {
if (!navigator.clipboard) {
fallbackCopyTextToClipboard(text);
return;
}
navigator.clipboard.writeText(text).then(function() {
console.log('Async: Copying to clipboard was successful!');
}, function(err) {
console.error('Async: Could not copy text: ', err);
});
}
var copyBobBtn = document.querySelector('.js-copy-bob-btn'),
copyJaneBtn = document.querySelector('.js-copy-jane-btn');
copyBobBtn.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
copyTextToClipboard('Bob');
});
copyJaneBtn.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
copyTextToClipboard('Jane');
});
<div style="display:inline-block; vertical-align:top;">
<button class="js-copy-bob-btn">Set clipboard to BOB</button><br /><br />
<button class="js-copy-jane-btn">Set clipboard to JANE</button>
</div>
<div style="display:inline-block;">
<textarea class="js-test-textarea" cols="35" rows="4">Try pasting into here to see what you have on your clipboard:
</textarea>
</div>
How do I copy a string to the clipboard?
Actually, pywin32
and ctypes
seem to be an overkill for this simple task. Tkinter
is a cross-platform GUI framework, which ships with Python by default and has clipboard accessing methods along with other cool stuff.
If all you need is to put some text to system clipboard, this will do it:
from Tkinter import Tk
r = Tk()
r.withdraw()
r.clipboard_clear()
r.clipboard_append('i can has clipboardz?')
r.update() # now it stays on the clipboard after the window is closed
r.destroy()
And that's all, no need to mess around with platform-specific third-party libraries.
If you are using Python 3, replace TKinter
with tkinter
.
how can I copy a string to the windows clipboard? python 3
You can do this:
>>> import subprocess
>>> def copy2clip(txt):
... cmd='echo '+txt.strip()+'|clip'
... return subprocess.check_call(cmd, shell=True)
...
>>> copy2clip('now this is on my clipboard')
How to copy string to clipboard in C?
Read the MSDN documentation for the SetClipboardData function. It appears you are missing a few steps and releasing the memory prematurely. First of all, you must call
OpenClipboard before you can use SetClipboardData. Secondly, the system takes ownership of the memory passed to the clipboard and it must be unlocked. Also, the memory must be movable, which requires the GMEM_MOVEABLE flag as used with GlobalAlloc (instead of LocalAlloc).
const char* output = "Test";
const size_t len = strlen(output) + 1;
HGLOBAL hMem = GlobalAlloc(GMEM_MOVEABLE, len);
memcpy(GlobalLock(hMem), output, len);
GlobalUnlock(hMem);
OpenClipboard(0);
EmptyClipboard();
SetClipboardData(CF_TEXT, hMem);
CloseClipboard();
How do I copy the contents of a String to the clipboard in C#?
You can use System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard.SetText(...)
.
How to copy String into Clipboard using a onClick Eventlistener
You can try something like this.
function myFunction() { // variable content to be copied var copyText = "Test" // create an input element let input = document.createElement('input'); // setting it's type to be text input.setAttribute('type', 'text'); // setting the input value to equal to the text we are copying input.value = copyText; // appending it to the document document.body.appendChild(input); // calling the select, to select the text displayed // if it's not in the document we won't be able to input.select(); // calling the copy command document.execCommand("copy"); // removing the input from the document document.body.removeChild(input)}
<button onclick="myFunction()">Copy text</button>
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