The relatively new Clipboard API in browsers lets you load up the user’s clipboard as though they’d copied something themselves.
Copying text or images is fairly well documented, but examples writing rich text (as HTML) are harder to come by.
At time of writing, this is implemented in Chrome 86+ and in Safari. I got the content for this post from the Glitch project created by dsleeps at Google.
How to copy rich text HTML onto the Clipboard API
This sample assumes you have a <div class="js-output"></div>
which contains your HTML to copy.
I’ll cut right to it:
try {
const content = document.getElementsByClassName('js-output')[0].innerHTML;
const blobInput = new Blob([content], {type: 'text/html'});
const clipboardItemInput = new ClipboardItem({'text/html' : blobInput});
navigator.clipboard.write([clipboardItemInput]);
} catch(e) {
// Handle error with user feedback - "Copy failed!" kind of thing
console.log(e);
}
Key things:
- Get the HTML string (I’m using
innerHTML
of an element for this) - Create a new
Blob
. - Create a
ClipboardItem
around the blob, specifying MIME type again - Finally, write the
ClipboardItem
to the clipboard API.
Demo
I have a quickly-made Vue app with a ‘Copy to Clipboard’ button at https://stegriff.github.io/deployment-complete/. Source repo at https://github.com/stegriff/deployment-complete.
I hope this tutorial helps you! What will you make? 📋
Top comments (0)