Why

Copy text to the clipboard shouldn’t be hard. It shouldn’t require dozens of steps to configure or hundreds of KBs to load. But most of all, it shouldn’t depend on Flash or any bloated framework.

That’s why clipboard.js exists.

Install

You can get it on npm.

npm install clipboard --saveCopy the code

Or bower, too.

bower install clipboard --saveCopy the code

If you’re not into package management, just download a ZIP file.

Setup

First, include the script located on the dist folder.

<script src="dist/clipboard.min.js"></script>Copy the code

Now, you need to instantiate it using a DOM selector. This selector corresponds to the trigger element(s), for example <button class="btn">.

new Clipboard('.btn');Copy the code

Internally, we need to fetch all elements that matches with your selector and attach event listeners for each one. But guess what? If you have hundreds of matches, this operation can consume a lot of memory.

For this reason we use event delegation which replaces multiple event listeners with just a single listener. After all, #perfmatters.

Usage

We’re living a declarative renaissance, that’s why we decided to take advantage of HTML5 data attributes for better usability.

Copy text from another element

A pretty common use case is to copy content from another element. You can do that by adding a data-clipboard-target attribute in your trigger element.

The value you include on this attribute needs to match another’s element id attribute.

<! -- Target --> <input id="foo" value="https://github.com/zenorocha/clipboard.js.git"> <! -- Trigger --> <button class="btn" data-clipboard-target="foo"> <img src="assets/clippy.svg" alt="Copy to clipboard"> </button>Copy the code

Cut text from another element

Additionally, you can define a data-clipboard-action attribute to specify if you want to either copy or cut content.

If you omit this attribute, copy will be used by default.

<! -- Target --> <textarea id="bar">Mussum ipsum cacilds... </textarea> <! -- Trigger --> <button class="btn" data-clipboard-action="cut" data-clipboard-target="bar"> Cut to clipboard </button>Copy the code

As you may expect, the cut action only works on <input> or <textarea> elements.

Copy text from attribute

Truth is, you don’t even need another element to copy its content from. You can just include a data-clipboard-text attribute in your trigger element.

<! -- Trigger --> <button class=" BTN "data-clipboard-text="Just because you can't mean you should -- clipboard.js"> Copy to clipboard </button>Copy the code

Events

There are cases where you’d like to show some user feedback or capture what has been selected after a copy/cut operation.

That’s why we fire custom events such as success and error for you to listen and implement your custom logic.

var clipboard = new Clipboard('.btn');

clipboard.on('success', function(e) {
    console.info('Action:', e.action);
    console.info('Text:', e.text);
    console.info('Trigger:', e.trigger);

    e.clearSelection();
});

clipboard.on('error', function(e) {
    console.error('Action:', e.action);
    console.error('Trigger:', e.trigger);
});Copy the code

For a live demonstration, just open your console 🙂

Browser Support

This library relies on both Selection and execCommandAPIs. The second one is supported in the following browsers.

  • Chrome 42+

  • Firefox 41+

  • IE 9+

  • Opera 29+

  • Safari ✘

Although copy/cut operations with execCommand aren’t supported on Safari yet (including mobile), it gracefully degrades because Selectionis supported.

That means you can show a tooltip saying Copied! when success event is called and Press Ctrl+C to copy when error event is called because the text is already selected.

For a live demonstration, open this site on Safari.