Click to Copy!

Hey Guys 👋

Ever wondered how some websites have "click to copy" functionality?

You can also do just that, whether you're building an e-commerce website where you want user to click on share button to write the url of the product on their website.
or you are building some website/documentation where people can click somewhere and copy the code snippet.

In this article I will explain how you can mess around with the user's clipboard 😄.

Let's get started 🚀

To explain this better, I will create a demo project. You can follow along if you want to.

Make a folder and name it whatever you like.
In that folder make two files
- 1. index.html
- 1. app.js

Add the following HTML code in index.html.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>Copy to Clipboard 📋</title>
    <style></style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h2>Implementing copy to clipboard with a simple click 📋</h2>
    <button>Click to copy</button>
    <script src="./app.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

Now select h2 and button element in app.js:

const h2 = document.querySelector('h2');
const button = document.querySelector('button');

Preview the index.html in your browser.

Side note: This demo will not work in IE

It should look something like this 👇 preview of `index.html`

Now to alter the user's clipboard we have to use Clipboard API.
The clipboard object is exposed by the navigator.clipboard property.

Add the following code in the app.js file:

const cb = navigator.clipboard;

console.log(cb) will look something like this 👇

Preview of clipboard

👉 Remember: Clipboard API is asnychronous, means every method will return a promise which will resolve or reject. To consume the promise we can either use async/await syntax or .then/.catch.

Reading text from clipboard 📋

To read the text from clipboard I will add a click event listener to the button:

In the event listener I will call a method called readText(), which is available on the cb object we accessed earlier:

button.addEventListener('click', async () => {
const text = await cb.readText();
console.log(text);
  // output will be whatever you last copied, 
  // or empty string if the
  // copied data is not of type text.
});

To read the text from clipboard user must grant read permission, otherwise the operation will fail. 👇
If permission is denied 👇

You check if the user granted the permission or not using the Permission API.

Writing text to clipboard 📋

To write the text to user's clipboard we use writeText() method available on the cb object.
Writing permission is given automatically by the browser.

Write the following the code in the app.js:

button.addEventListener('click', async () => {
  // const text = await cb.readText();
  // console.log(text);

  // writing the inner text of the h2 element
  // to the user's clipboard.  
    cb.writeText(h2.innerText).then(() => {
        console.log('text written to clipboard')
    })
});

Click to Copy!

Messing around with user's clipboard using JS.

Hey Guys 👋

Let's get started 🚀

Reading text from clipboard 📋

Writing text to clipboard 📋

Thanks ❤️ for giving it a read, I hope you found it useful.

For concise tips and tricks, please follow me on Twitter

Happy Coding 💚