Copy HTML with native Clipboard API

20 January 2021

The relatively new Clipboard API in browsers lets you load up the user’s clipboard as though they’d copied something themselves. Doing so with text or images is fairly well documented, but writing rich text (as HTML) is harder to come by.

At time of writing, it’s implemented in Chrome 86+ and in Safari. I got the content for this post from the Glitch project created by dsleeps at Google.

How to copy rich text HTML onto the Clipboard API

This sample assumes you have a `<div class="js-output"></div>” containing your HTML to copy.

I’ll cut right to it:

try {
	const content = document.getElementsByClassName('js-output')[0].innerHTML;
	const blobInput = new Blob([content], {type: 'text/html'});
	const clipboardItemInput = new ClipboardItem({'text/html' : blobInput});
	navigator.clipboard.write([clipboardItemInput]);
} catch(e) {
	// Handle error with user feedback - "Copy failed!" kind of thing
	console.log(e);
}

Key things:

• Get the HTML string (I’m using innerHTML of an element for this)
• Create a new Blob.
  • Param one must be an Array-like or a USVString value. So we wrap our HTML content in an array.
  • Param two is an options object, where we set the MIME type.
• Create a ClipboardItem around the blob, specifying MIME type again
• Finally, write the ClipboardItem to the clipboard API.

Demo

I have a quickly-made Vue app with a ‘Copy to Clipboard’ button at https://stegriff.github.io/deployment-complete/. Source repo at https://github.com/stegriff/deployment-complete.

Hoping this tutorial helps you!