How do I read text from the clipboard?

Answer #1:

You can use the module called win32clipboard, which is part of pywin32.

Here is an example that first sets the clipboard data then gets it:

import win32clipboard

# set clipboard data
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
win32clipboard.SetClipboardText('testing 123')
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()

# get clipboard data
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
data = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
print data

An important reminder from the documentation:

When the window has finished examining or changing the clipboard,
close the clipboard by calling CloseClipboard. This enables other
windows to access the clipboard. Do not place an object on the
clipboard after calling CloseClipboard.

Answer #2:

you can easily get this done through the built-in module Tkinter which is basically a GUI library. This code creates a blank widget to get the clipboard content from OS.

from tkinter import Tk  # Python 3
#from Tkinter import Tk # for Python 2.x
Tk().clipboard_get()

Answer #3:

I’ve seen many suggestions to use the win32 module, but Tkinter provides the shortest and easiest method I’ve seen, as in this post: How do I copy a string to the clipboard on Windows using Python?

Plus, Tkinter is in the python standard library.

Answer #4:

I found out this was the easiest way to get access to the clipboard from python:

1) Install pyperclip:
pip install pyperclip

2) Usage:

import pyperclip

s = pyperclip.paste()
pyperclip.copy(s)

# the type of s is string

Tested on Win10 64-bit, Python 3.5 and Python 3.7.3 (64-bit). Seems to work with non-ASCII characters, too.
Tested characters include ±°©©???????åäö

Answer #5:

If you don’t want to install extra packages, ctypes can get the job done as well.

import ctypes

CF_TEXT = 1

kernel32 = ctypes.windll.kernel32
kernel32.GlobalLock.argtypes = [ctypes.c_void_p]
kernel32.GlobalLock.restype = ctypes.c_void_p
kernel32.GlobalUnlock.argtypes = [ctypes.c_void_p]
user32 = ctypes.windll.user32
user32.GetClipboardData.restype = ctypes.c_void_p

def get_clipboard_text():
    user32.OpenClipboard(0)
    try:
        if user32.IsClipboardFormatAvailable(CF_TEXT):
            data = user32.GetClipboardData(CF_TEXT)
            data_locked = kernel32.GlobalLock(data)
            text = ctypes.c_char_p(data_locked)
            value = text.value
            kernel32.GlobalUnlock(data_locked)
            return value
    finally:
        user32.CloseClipboard()

print(get_clipboard_text())

Answer #6:

The most upvoted answer above is weird in a way that it simply clears the Clipboard and then gets the content (which is then empty). One could clear the clipboard to be sure that some clipboard content type like “formated text” does not “cover” your plain text content you want to save in the clipboard.

The following piece of code replaces all newlines in the clipboard by spaces, then removes all double spaces and finally saves the content back to the clipboard:

import win32clipboard

win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
c = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
c = c.replace('n', ' ')
c = c.replace('r', ' ')
while c.find('  ') != -1:
    c = c.replace('  ', ' ')
win32clipboard.SetClipboardText(c)
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()

Answer #7:

The python standard library does it…

try:
    # Python3
    import tkinter as tk
except ImportError:
    # Python2
    import Tkinter as tk

def getClipboardText():
    root = tk.Tk()
    # keep the window from showing
    root.withdraw()
    return root.clipboard_get()

Answer #8:

Use Pythons library Clipboard

Its simply used like this:

import clipboard
clipboard.copy("this text is now in the clipboard")
print clipboard.paste()