Unblocking clipboard access

Safer, unblocked clipboard access for text and images

Jason Miller

Thomas Steiner

The traditional way of getting access to the system clipboard was via document.execCommand() for clipboard interactions. Though widely supported, this method of cutting and pasting came at a cost: clipboard access was synchronous, and could only read and write to the DOM.

That's fine for small bits of text, but there are many cases where blocking the page for clipboard transfer is a poor experience. Time consuming sanitization or image decoding might be needed before content can be safely pasted. The browser may need to load or inline linked resources from a pasted document. That would block the page while waiting on the disk or network. Imagine adding permissions into the mix, requiring that the browser block the page while requesting clipboard access. At the same time, the permissions put in place around document.execCommand() for clipboard interaction are loosely defined and vary between browsers.

The Async Clipboard API addresses these issues, providing a well-defined permissions model that doesn't block the page. The Async Clipboard API is limited to handling text and images on most browsers, but support varies. Be sure to carefully study the browser compatibility overview for each of the following sections.

Copy: writing data to the clipboard

writeText()

To copy text to the clipboard call writeText(). Since this API is asynchronous, the writeText() function returns a Promise that resolves or rejects depending on whether the passed text is copied successfully:

async function copyPageUrl() {
  try {
    await navigator.clipboard.writeText(location.href);
    console.log('Page URL copied to clipboard');
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Failed to copy: ', err);
  }
}

write()

Actually, writeText() is just a convenience method for the generic write() method, which also lets you copy images to the clipboard. Like writeText(), it is asynchronous and returns a Promise.

To write an image to the clipboard, you need the image as a blob. One way to do this is by requesting the image from a server using fetch(), then calling blob() on the response.

Requesting an image from the server may not be desirable or possible for a variety of reasons. Fortunately, you can also draw the image to a canvas and call the canvas' toBlob() method.

Next, pass an array of ClipboardItem objects as a parameter to the write() method. Currently you can only pass one image at a time, but we hope to add support for multiple images in the future. ClipboardItem takes an object with the MIME type of the image as the key and the blob as the value. For blob objects obtained from fetch() or canvas.toBlob(), the blob.type property automatically contains the correct MIME type for an image.

try {
  const imgURL = '/images/generic/file.png';
  const data = await fetch(imgURL);
  const blob = await data.blob();
  await navigator.clipboard.write([
    new ClipboardItem({
      // The key is determined dynamically based on the blob's type.
      [blob.type]: blob
    })
  ]);
  console.log('Image copied.');
} catch (err) {
  console.error(err.name, err.message);
}

Alternatively, you can write a promise to the ClipboardItem object. For this pattern, you need to know the MIME type of the data beforehand.

try {
  const imgURL = '/images/generic/file.png';
  await navigator.clipboard.write([
    new ClipboardItem({
      // Set the key beforehand and write a promise as the value.
      'image/png': fetch(imgURL).then(response => response.blob()),
    })
  ]);
  console.log('Image copied.');
} catch (err) {
  console.error(err.name, err.message);
}

The copy event

In the case where a user initiates a clipboard copy and does not call preventDefault(), the copy event includes a clipboardData property with the items already in the right format. If you want to implement your own logic, you need to call preventDefault() to prevent the default behavior in favor of your own implementation. In this case, clipboardData will be empty. Consider a page with text and an image, and when the user selects all and initiates a clipboard copy, your custom solution should discard text and only copy the image. You can achieve this as shown in the code sample below. What's not covered in this example is how to fall back to earlier APIs when the Clipboard API isn't supported.

<!-- The image we want on the clipboard. -->
<img src="kitten.webp" alt="Cute kitten.">
<!-- Some text we're not interested in. -->
<p>Lorem ipsum</p>

document.addEventListener("copy", async (e) => {
  // Prevent the default behavior.
  e.preventDefault();
  try {
    // Prepare an array for the clipboard items.
    let clipboardItems = [];
    // Assume `blob` is the blob representation of `kitten.webp`.
    clipboardItems.push(
      new ClipboardItem({
        [blob.type]: blob,
      })
    );
    await navigator.clipboard.write(clipboardItems);
    console.log("Image copied, text ignored.");
  } catch (err) {
    console.error(err.name, err.message);
  }
});

For the copy event:

For ClipboardItem:

Paste: reading data from clipboard

readText()

To read text from the clipboard, call navigator.clipboard.readText() and wait for the returned promise to resolve:

async function getClipboardContents() {
  try {
    const text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();
    console.log('Pasted content: ', text);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Failed to read clipboard contents: ', err);
  }
}

read()

The navigator.clipboard.read() method is also asynchronous and returns a promise. To read an image from the clipboard, obtain a list of ClipboardItem objects, then iterate over them.

Each ClipboardItem can hold its contents in different types, so you'll need to iterate over the list of types, again using a for...of loop. For each type, call the getType() method with the current type as an argument to obtain the corresponding blob. As before, this code is not tied to images, and will work with other future file types.

async function getClipboardContents() {
  try {
    const clipboardItems = await navigator.clipboard.read();
    for (const clipboardItem of clipboardItems) {
      for (const type of clipboardItem.types) {
        const blob = await clipboardItem.getType(type);
        console.log(URL.createObjectURL(blob));
      }
    }
  } catch (err) {
    console.error(err.name, err.message);
  }
}

Working with pasted files

It is useful for users to be able to use clipboard keyboard shortcuts such as ctrl+c and ctrl+v. Chromium exposes read-only files on the clipboard as outlined below. This triggers when the user hits the operating system's default paste shortcut or when the user clicks Edit then Paste in the browser's menu bar. No further plumbing code is needed.

document.addEventListener("paste", async e => {
  e.preventDefault();
  if (!e.clipboardData.files.length) {
    return;
  }
  const file = e.clipboardData.files[0];
  // Read the file's contents, assuming it's a text file.
  // There is no way to write back to it.
  console.log(await file.text());
});

The paste event

As noted before, there are plans to introduce events to work with the Clipboard API, but for now you can use the existing paste event. It works nicely with the new asynchronous methods for reading clipboard text. As with the copy event, don't forget to call preventDefault().

document.addEventListener('paste', async (e) => {
  e.preventDefault();
  const text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();
  console.log('Pasted text: ', text);
});

Handling multiple MIME types

Most implementations put multiple data formats on the clipboard for a single cut or copy operation. There are two reasons for this: as an app developer, you have no way of knowing the capabilities of the app that a user wants to copy text or images to, and many applications support pasting structured data as plain text. This is typically presented to users with an Edit menu item with a name such as Paste and match style or Paste without formatting.

The following example shows how to do this. This example uses fetch() to obtain image data, but it could also come from a <canvas> or the File System Access API.

async function copy() {
  const image = await fetch('kitten.png').then(response => response.blob());
  const text = new Blob(['Cute sleeping kitten'], {type: 'text/plain'});
  const item = new ClipboardItem({
    'text/plain': text,
    'image/png': image
  });
  await navigator.clipboard.write([item]);
}

Security and permissions

Clipboard access has always presented a security concern for browsers. Without proper permissions, a page could silently copy all manner of malicious content to a user's clipboard that would produce catastrophic results when pasted. Imagine a web page that silently copies rm -rf / or a decompression bomb image to your clipboard.

Giving web pages unfettered read access to the clipboard is even more troublesome. Users routinely copy sensitive information like passwords and personal details to the clipboard, which could then be read by any page without the user's knowledge.

As with many new APIs, the Clipboard API is only supported for pages served over HTTPS. To help prevent abuse, clipboard access is only allowed when a page is the active tab. Pages in active tabs can write to the clipboard without requesting permission, but reading from the clipboard always requires permission.

Permissions for copy and paste have been added to the Permissions API. The clipboard-write permission is granted automatically to pages when they are the active tab. The clipboard-read permission must be requested, which you can do by trying to read data from the clipboard. The code below shows the latter:

const queryOpts = { name: 'clipboard-read', allowWithoutGesture: false };
const permissionStatus = await navigator.permissions.query(queryOpts);
// Will be 'granted', 'denied' or 'prompt':
console.log(permissionStatus.state);

// Listen for changes to the permission state
permissionStatus.onchange = () => {
  console.log(permissionStatus.state);
};

You can also control whether a user gesture is required to invoke cutting or pasting using the allowWithoutGesture option. The default for this value varies by browser, so you should always include it.

Here's where the asynchronous nature of the Clipboard API really comes in handy: attempting to read or write clipboard data automatically prompts the user for permission if it hasn't already been granted. Since the API is promise-based, this is completely transparent, and a user denying clipboard permission causes the promise to reject so the page can respond appropriately.

Because browsers only allow clipboard access when a page is the active tab, you'll find that some of the examples here don't run if pasted directly into the browser's console, since the developer tools themselves are the active tab. There's a trick: defer clipboard access using setTimeout(), then quickly click inside the page to focus it before the functions are called:

setTimeout(async () => {
  const text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();
  console.log(text);
}, 2000);

Permissions policy integration

To use the API in iframes, you need to enable it with Permissions Policy, which defines a mechanism that allows for selectively enabling and disabling various browser features and APIs. Concretely, you need to pass either or both of clipboard-read or clipboard-write, depending on the needs of your app.

<iframe
    src="index.html"
    allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write"
>
</iframe>

Feature detection

To use the Async Clipboard API while supporting all browsers, test for navigator.clipboard and fall back to earlier methods. For example, here's how you might implement pasting to include other browsers.

document.addEventListener('paste', async (e) => {
  e.preventDefault();
  let text;
  if (navigator.clipboard) {
    text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();
  }
  else {
    text = e.clipboardData.getData('text/plain');
  }
  console.log('Got pasted text: ', text);
});

That's not the whole story. Before the Async Clipboard API, there were a mix of different copy and paste implementations across web browsers. In most browsers, the browser's own copy and paste can be triggered using document.execCommand('copy') and document.execCommand('paste'). If the text to be copied is a string not present in the DOM, it must be injected into the DOM and selected:

button.addEventListener('click', (e) => {
  const input = document.createElement('input');
  input.style.display = 'none';
  document.body.appendChild(input);
  input.value = text;
  input.focus();
  input.select();
  const result = document.execCommand('copy');
  if (result === 'unsuccessful') {
    console.error('Failed to copy text.');
  }
  input.remove();
});

Demos

You can play with the Async Clipboard API in the demos below. On Glitch you can remix the text demo or the image demo to experiment with them.

The first example demonstrates moving text on and off the clipboard.

To try the API with images, use this demo. Recall that only PNGs are supported and only in a few browsers.

Related links

• MDN
• Web custom formats

Acknowledgements

The Asynchronous Clipboard API was implemented by Darwin Huang and Gary Kačmarčík. Darwin also provided the demo. Thanks to Kyarik and again Gary Kačmarčík for reviewing parts of this article.

Hero image by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.