Show contents of the Windows clipboard

Question

How can I see what the Windows clipboard currently contains without using the paste operation?

I don't want the "pasted-to" application to perform any actions on the clipboard (for example, formatting text and converting).

Is there a tool which shows the clipboard's objects and their format (CF_BITMAP, CF_TEXT, etc.) and content (in simple bytes for example)?

Answer 1

There is a list of clipboard manager tools at Wikipedia: Clipboard manager

ClipX allows you to view a log of previous clipboard entries by pressing Ctrl + Shift + V.

Answer 2

NirSoft offers a free “Inside Clipboard” utility which allows you to see the raw clipboard contents and different formats. It’s close to what you would see with a programmatic API but with a nice GUI. Its GUI includes hex view. It also allows data to be exported and allows saving a snapshot to a .clp file which it can open and allow you to examine later.

If you need to see things at the level of the programmatic API to quick check things without writing a program yourself, I recommend this tool.

Answer 3

If using .NET you can query the Clipboard object.