I heard that you can't copy text (in the browser) without using something like Flash; so, is there a way to select text by using an anchor and JavaScript or jQuery.
<p>Text to be copied</p>
<a>Copy Text Above</a>
On newer browsers, you can do this to select and copy. This is a pure Javascript solution.
function copy_text(element) {
//Before we copy, we are going to select the text.
var text = document.getElementById(element);
var selection = window.getSelection();
var range = document.createRange();
range.selectNodeContents(text);
selection.removeAllRanges();
selection.addRange(range);
//add to clipboard.
document.execCommand('copy');
}
This copy command works on all major browsers, Chrome, Firefox (Gecko), Internet Explorer, and Opera, excluding Safari.
Edit: Note for the future -
While the preceding still works, there is talk about moving to the Permissions API and using the Clipboard interface, which would look like navigator.clipboard.writeText('text')
. This standard is not yet finalized nor supported by many browsers. As security becomes more of a concern, expect something like this in the future.
I found this jQuery solution:
$(function() {
$('input').click(function() {
$(this).focus();
$(this).select();
document.execCommand('copy');
$(this).after("Copied to clipboard");
});
});
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<input type="text" value="copy me!" />
Source
Given the following example html:
<div class="announcementInfoText">
<p class="copyToClipboard">
<a id="selectAll">Select All Text</a>
</p>
<textarea ID="description" class="announcementTextArea">This is some sample text that I want to be select to copy to the clipboard</textarea>
</div>
you can select the text within the textarea with the following jQuery:
$("#selectAll").click(function () {
$(this).parents(".announcementInfoText").children("textarea").select();
});
Now that the text "This is some sample text that I want to be select to copy to the clipboard" is selected, you can simply hit Ctrl+C and the text is copied to the clipboard.
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