Modern copy to clipboard. No Flash. Just 2kb
Copying 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.
You can get it on npm.
npm install clipboard --save
Or bower, too.
bower install clipboard --save
If you’re not into package management, just download a ZIP file.
First, include the script located on the dist
folder.
<script src="dist/clipboard.min.js"></script>
Or load it from a CDN.
<script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/zenorocha/clipboard.js/master/dist/clipboard.min.js"></script>
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');
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.
We’re living a declarative renaissance, that’s why we decided to take advantage of HTML5 data attributes for better usability.
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 selector.
<!-- 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>
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>
As you may expect, the cut
action only works on <input>
or <textarea>
elements.
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 doesn't mean you should — clipboard.js">
Copy to clipboard
</button>
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);
});
For a live demonstration, open this site and just your console :)
If you don’t want to modify your HTML, there’s a pretty handy imperative API for you to use. All you need to do is declare a function, do your thing, and return a value.
For instance, if you want to dynamically set a target
, you’ll need to return a Node.
new Clipboard('.btn', {
target: function(trigger) {
return trigger.nextElementSibling;
}
});
If you want to dynamically set a text
, you’ll return a String.
new Clipboard('.btn', {
text: function(trigger) {
return trigger.getAttribute('aria-label');
}
});
Also, with are working with single page apps, you may want to manage the lifecycle of the DOM more precisely. Here’s how you clean up the events and objects that we create.
var clipboard = new Clipboard('.btn');
clipboard.destroy();
This library relies on both Selection and execCommand APIs. The second one is supported in the following browsers.
42+ ✔ | 41+ ✔ | 9+ ✔ | 29+ ✔ | Nope ✘ |
Although copy/cut operations with execCommand aren’t supported on Safari yet (including mobile), it gracefully degrades because Selection is 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.
MIT License © Zeno Rocha