Clipboard Copy

Jeffrey Larson
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In the past I’ve wondered if it was possible to make a cross-browser (JavaScript) script that a webpage could execute to copy some text to the windows clipboard. Would be handy and would save the user from pulling the whole CTRL+C trick out.

It was pretty easy to do with Internet Explorer with the code below… but we all don’t use IE.

holdtext.innerText = copytext.innerText;
Copied = holdtext.createTextRange();
Copied.execCommand("Copy");

Credit to Mark O’Sullivan of http://lussumo.com/ since he has a solution for this problem. In his file browser / photo gallery application, there is a link to copy the URL of the file to the clipboard… works in both Firefox and IE (I also checked in Opera 8.5 and it didn’t seem to work).

Here is the solution implemented in a javascript function:

Update: I have updated the copy() function in the script to use encodeURIComponent() instead of escape() which will allow use of ‘+’ to be copied as well.


function copy(inElement) {
  if (inElement.createTextRange) {
    var range = inElement.createTextRange();
    if (range && BodyLoaded==1)
      range.execCommand('Copy');
  } else {
    var flashcopier = 'flashcopier';
    if(!document.getElementById(flashcopier)) {
      var divholder = document.createElement('div');
      divholder.id = flashcopier;
      document.body.appendChild(divholder);
    }
    document.getElementById(flashcopier).innerHTML = '';
    var divinfo = '<embed src="_clipboard.swf" FlashVars="clipboard='+encodeURIComponent(inElement.value)+'" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>';
    document.getElementById(flashcopier).innerHTML = divinfo;
  }
}

Pretty slick I’d say, he’s using a Macromedia Flash file to perform the copy on the Browser’s behalf (since Firefox/Netscape’s security settings do not allow access to the clipboard by default).

I’ve uploaded the SWF file that you can use in your own webpage.

This software is licensed under the GPL so you can take this solution, change it, whatever, free.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 at 1:57pmand is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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