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How can rich text or HTML source code be obtained from the X clipboard? For example, if you copy some text from a web browser and paste it into kompozer, it pastes as HTML, with links etc. preserved. However, xclip -o for the same selection just outputs plain text, reformatted in a way similar to that of elinks -dump. I'd like to pull the HTML out and into a text editor (specifically vim).
I asked the same question on superuser.com, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn't get any informative responses. The X clipboard API is to me yet a mysterious beast; any tips on hacking something up to pull this information are most welcome. My language of choice these days is Python, but pretty much anything is okay.
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You can paste text using CTRL+V where the icon behaves as a toggle to paste copied text as plain text. You cannot copy and paste HTML source that exceeds the maximum allowed characters for the rich content field.
Select the portion of code you'd like to copy, then go the Edit menu and select Copy Special -> Copy as RTF. Your code, complete with syntax highlighting colors, is now stored on the clipboard. Simply press Ctrl + V in your other application to paste the code with syntax highlighting. It's that simple!
To complement @rkhayrov's answer, there exists a command for that already: xclip. Or more exactly, there's a patch to xclip which was added to xclip later on in 2010, but hasn't been released yet that does that. So, assuming your OS like Debian ships with the subversion head of xclip (2019 edit: version 0.13 with those changes was eventually released in 2016 (and pulled into Debian in January 2019)):
To list the targets for the CLIPBOARD selection:
$ xclip -selection clipboard -o -t TARGETS TIMESTAMP TARGETS MULTIPLE SAVE_TARGETS text/html text/_moz_htmlcontext text/_moz_htmlinfo UTF8_STRING COMPOUND_TEXT TEXT STRING text/x-moz-url-priv To select a particular target:
$ xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/200540/rkhayrov" title="3017 reputation" class="comment-user">rkhayrov</a> $ xclip -selection clipboard -o -t UTF8_STRING rkhayrov $ xclip -selection clipboard -o -t TIMESTAMP 684176350 And xclip can also set and own a selection (-i instead of -o).
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In X11 you have to communicate with the selection owner, ask about supported formats, and then request data in the specific format. I think the easiest way to do this is using existing windowing toolkits. E,g. with Python and GTK:
#!/usr/bin/python import glib, gtk def test_clipboard(): clipboard = gtk.Clipboard() targets = clipboard.wait_for_targets() print "Targets available:", ", ".join(map(str, targets)) for target in targets: print "Trying '%s'..." % str(target) contents = clipboard.wait_for_contents(target) if contents: print contents.data def main(): mainloop = glib.MainLoop() def cb(): test_clipboard() mainloop.quit() glib.idle_add(cb) mainloop.run() if __name__ == "__main__": main() Output will look like this:
$ ./clipboard.py Targets available: TIMESTAMP, TARGETS, MULTIPLE, text/html, text/_moz_htmlcontext, text/_moz_htmlinfo, UTF8_STRING, COMPOUND_TEXT, TEXT, STRING, text/x-moz-url-priv ... Trying 'text/html'... I asked <a href="http://superuser.com/questions/144185/getting-html-source-or-rich-text-from-the-x-clipboard">the same question on superuser.com</a>, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn't get any informative responses. Trying 'text/_moz_htmlcontext'... <html><body class="question-page"><div class="container"><div id="content"><div id="mainbar"><div id="question"><table><tbody><tr><td class="postcell"><div><div class="post-text"><p></p></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></div></div></body></html> ... Trying 'STRING'... I asked the same question on superuser.com, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn't get any informative responses. Trying 'text/x-moz-url-priv'... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3261379/getting-html-source-or-rich-text-from-the-x-clipboard If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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