How do I copy a string to the clipboard?

Question

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.

I didn't have a solution, just a workaround.

Windows Vista onwards has an inbuilt command called clip that takes the output of a command from command line and puts it into the clipboard. For example, ipconfig | clip.

So I made a function with the os module which takes a string and adds it to the clipboard using the inbuilt Windows solution.

import os
def addToClipBoard(text):
    command = 'echo ' + text.strip() + '| clip'
    os.system(command)

# Example
addToClipBoard('penny lane')

# Penny Lane is now in your ears, eyes, and clipboard.

As previously noted in the comments however, one downside to this approach is that the echo command automatically adds a newline to the end of your text. To avoid this you can use a modified version of the command:

def addToClipBoard(text):
    command = 'echo | set /p nul=' + text.strip() + '| clip'
    os.system(command)

If you are using Windows XP it will work just following the steps in Copy and paste from Windows XP Pro's command prompt straight to the Clipboard.

You can use pyperclip - cross-platform clipboard module. Or Xerox - similar module, except requires the win32 Python module to work on Windows.

You can also use ctypes to tap into the Windows API and avoid the massive pywin32 package. This is what I use (excuse the poor style, but the idea is there):

import ctypes

# Get required functions, strcpy..
strcpy = ctypes.cdll.msvcrt.strcpy
ocb = ctypes.windll.user32.OpenClipboard    # Basic clipboard functions
ecb = ctypes.windll.user32.EmptyClipboard
gcd = ctypes.windll.user32.GetClipboardData
scd = ctypes.windll.user32.SetClipboardData
ccb = ctypes.windll.user32.CloseClipboard
ga = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GlobalAlloc    # Global memory allocation
gl = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GlobalLock     # Global memory Locking
gul = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GlobalUnlock
GMEM_DDESHARE = 0x2000

def Get():
  ocb(None) # Open Clip, Default task

  pcontents = gcd(1) # 1 means CF_TEXT.. too lazy to get the token thingy...

  data = ctypes.c_char_p(pcontents).value

  #gul(pcontents) ?
  ccb()

  return data

def Paste(data):
  ocb(None) # Open Clip, Default task

  ecb()

  hCd = ga(GMEM_DDESHARE, len(bytes(data,"ascii")) + 1)

  pchData = gl(hCd)

  strcpy(ctypes.c_char_p(pchData), bytes(data, "ascii"))

  gul(hCd)

  scd(1, hCd)

  ccb()

You can use the excellent pandas, which has a built in clipboard support, but you need to pass through a DataFrame.

import pandas as pd
df=pd.DataFrame(['Text to copy'])
df.to_clipboard(index=False,header=False)

The simplest way is with pyperclip. Works in python 2 and 3.

To install this library, use:

pip install pyperclip

Example usage:

import pyperclip

pyperclip.copy("your string")

If you want to get the contents of the clipboard:

clipboard_content = pyperclip.paste()

Here's the most easy and reliable way I found if you're okay depending on Pandas. However I don't think this is officially part of the Pandas API so it may break with future updates. It works as of 0.25.3

from pandas.io import clipboard
clipboard.copy("test")