How to paste text from clipboard through selenium-webdriver and Java?

Question

I want have a text that is copied to the clipboard and would want to paste that into a text field.

Can someone please let me know how to do that

for ex:-

driver.get("https://mail.google.com/");

driver.get("https://www.guerrillamail.com/");
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.findElement(By.id("copy_to_clip")).click(); -->copied to clipboard
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.findElement(By.id("nav-item-compose")).click(); 

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(20, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.findElement(By.name("to")).???;//i have to paste my text here that is copied from above

Answer 1

If clicking in the button with id 'copy_to_clip' really copies the content to clipboard then you may use keyboard shortcut option. I think, you might have not tried with simulating CTRL + v combination. Activate your destination text field by clicking on it and then use your shortcut. This may help.

Code Snippets:

driver.findElement(By.name("to")).click(); // Set focus on target element by clicking on it

//now paste your content from clipboard
Actions actions = new Actions(driver);
actions.sendKeys(Keys.chord(Keys.LEFT_CONTROL, "v")).build().perform();

Answer 2

As per your question as you are already having some text within the clipboard to paste that into a text field you can use the getDefaultToolkit() method and you can use the following solution:

//required imports
import java.awt.HeadlessException;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.datatransfer.DataFlavor;
import java.awt.datatransfer.UnsupportedFlavorException;
import java.io.IOException;
//other lines of code
driver.findElement(By.id("copy_to_clip")).click(); //text copied to clipboard
String myText = (String) Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().getData(DataFlavor.stringFlavor); // extracting the text that was copied to the clipboard
driver.findElement(By.name("to")).sendKeys(myText);//passing the extracted text to the text field

Answer 3

I came up with this to test pasting using the clipboard API. A big part of the problem was permissions that as of 12/2020 need to be kinda hacked in:

// Setup web driver
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

Map<String, Object> prefs = new HashMap<>();
Map<String, Object> profile = new HashMap<>();
Map<String, Object> contentSettings = new HashMap<>();
Map<String, Object> exceptions = new HashMap<>();
Map<String, Object> clipboard = new HashMap<>();
Map<String, Object> domain = new HashMap<>();

// Enable clipboard permissions
domain.put("expiration", 0);
domain.put("last_modified", System.currentTimeMillis());
domain.put("model", 0);
domain.put("setting", 1);
clipboard.put("https://google.com,*", domain);      //   <- Replace with test domain
exceptions.put("clipboard", clipboard);
contentSettings.put("exceptions", exceptions);
profile.put("content_settings", contentSettings);
prefs.put("profile", profile);
options.setExperimentalOption("prefs", prefs);

// [...]
driver.executeScript("navigator.clipboard.writeText('sample text');");

pasteButton.click();

Javascript in running in browser:

// Button handler
navigator.clipboard.readText().then(t-> console.log("pasted text: " + t));

Though if you ever spawn another window or that window loses focus, you'll get a practically-silent JavaScript error:

// JS console in browser
"DOMException: Document is not focused."

// error thrown in promise
{name: "NotAllowedError", message: "Document is not focused."}

So we need to figure out some way to bring the window into focus. We also need to prevent any other test code from interfeering with the clipboard while we are using it, so I created a Reentrant Lock.

I'm using this code to update the clipboard:

Test code:

try {
    Browser.clipboardLock.lock();
    b.updateClipboard("Sample text");
    b.sendPaste();
}finally {
    Browser.clipboardLock.unlock();
}

Browser Class:

public static ReentrantLock clipboardLock = new ReentrantLock();

public void updateClipboard(String newClipboardValue) throws InterruptedException {
    if (!clipboardLock.isHeldByCurrentThread())
        throw new IllegalStateException("Must own clipboardLock to update clipboard");
    
    for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
        webDriver.executeScript("" +
                "window.clipboardWritten = null;" +
                "window.clipboardWrittenError = null;" +
                "window.textToWrite=`" + newClipboardValue + "`;" +
                "navigator.clipboard.writeText(window.textToWrite)" +
                "   .then(()=>window.clipboardWritten=window.textToWrite)" +
                "   .catch(r=>window.clipboardWrittenError=r)" +
                ";"
        );
        
        while (!newClipboardValue.equals(webDriver.executeScript("return window.clipboardWritten;"))) {
            Object error = webDriver.executeScript("return window.clipboardWrittenError;");
            if (error != null) {
                String message = error.toString();
                try {
                    message = ((Map) error).get("name") + ": " + ((Map) error).get("message");
                } catch (Exception ex) {
                    log.debug("Could not get JS error string", ex);
                }
                if (message.equals("NotAllowedError: Document is not focused.")) {
                    webDriver.switchTo().window(webDriver.getWindowHandle());
                    break;
                } else {
                    throw new IllegalStateException("Clipboard could not be written: " + message);
                }
            }
            Thread.sleep(50);
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

Pyperclip works great for getting text copied to the clipboard - https://pypi.org/project/pyperclip/

Once you have some text copied to the clipboard, use pyperclip.paste() to retrieve it.