Copy rich HTML with the native Clipboard API 📋

The relatively new Clipboard API in browsers lets you load up the user’s clipboard as though they’d copied something themselves.

Copying text or images is fairly well documented, but examples writing rich text (as HTML) are harder to come by.

At time of writing, this is implemented in Chrome 86+ and in Safari. I got the content for this post from the Glitch project created by dsleeps at Google.

How to copy rich text HTML onto the Clipboard API

This sample assumes you have a <div class="js-output"></div> which contains your HTML to copy.

I’ll cut right to it:

try {
  const content = document.getElementsByClassName('js-output')[0].innerHTML;
  const blobInput = new Blob([content], {type: 'text/html'});
  const clipboardItemInput = new ClipboardItem({'text/html' : blobInput});
  navigator.clipboard.write([clipboardItemInput]);
} catch(e) {
  // Handle error with user feedback - "Copy failed!" kind of thing
  console.log(e);
}

Key things:

Get the HTML string (I’m using innerHTML of an element for this)
Create a new Blob.
- Param one must be an Array-like or a USVString value. So we wrap our HTML content in an array.
- Param two is an options object, where we set the MIME type.
Create a ClipboardItem around the blob, specifying MIME type again
Finally, write the ClipboardItem to the clipboard API.