Technical Spiders

Copy and Paste improved for the web...

28 Apr 2009

Browsers are silly. Why can’t they paste to a user’s clipboard? At least they can with flash, and that’s where clippy comes in. But what if you want to copy from a field that gets changed on the page? Now you can. My change to clippy allows you to provide a javascript callback to clippy.

demo:

code:

<script type="text/javascript">
  function getCopiedText() {
    return document.getElementById('foo').value;
  }
</script>
  <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"
        width="110"
        height="14"
        id="clippy" >
  <param name="movie" value="clippy.swf"/>
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />
  <param name="quality" value="high" />
  <param name="scale" value="noscale" />
  <param NAME="FlashVars" value="func=getCopiedText">
  <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF">
  <embed src="clippy.swf"
          width="110"
          height="14"
          name="clippy"
          quality="high"
          allowScriptAccess="always"
          type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
          pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
          FlashVars="func=getCopiedText"
          bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
/>
  </object>
  <div>
  <textarea id="foo">This is my awesome test</textarea>
  </div>