PyObjC is the way to go:
#!/usr/bin/python
from AppKit import NSPasteboard, NSStringPboardType
pb = NSPasteboard.generalPasteboard()
pbstring = pb.stringForType_(NSStringPboardType)
print u"Pastboard string: %s".encode("utf-8") % repr(pbstring)
This only supports text and will return None otherwise. You can extend it to support other data types as well, see NSPastboard Class Reference.
PyObjC is the way to go:
#!/usr/bin/python
from AppKit import NSPasteboard, NSStringPboardType
pb = NSPasteboard.generalPasteboard()
pbstring = pb.stringForType_(NSStringPboardType)
print u"Pastboard string: %s".encode("utf-8") % repr(pbstring)
This only supports text and will return None otherwise. You can extend it to support other data types as well, see NSPastboard Class Reference.
Have you looked at the xerox module?
It is supposed to support windows, OS X and Linux
Usage is as follows:
xerox.copy(u'some string')
And to paste:
>>> xerox.paste()
u'some string'
» pip install clipboard
Copy to system clipboard
macos - Can python send text to the Mac clipboard - Stack Overflow
copykitten: the missing clipboard library for Python
macOS tkinter clipboard only works once
How to write a Unicode string to the Mac clipboard:
import subprocess
def write_to_clipboard(output):
process = subprocess.Popen(
'pbcopy', env={'LANG': 'en_US.UTF-8'}, stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
process.communicate(output.encode('utf-8'))
How to read a Unicode string from the Mac clipboard:
import subprocess
def read_from_clipboard():
return subprocess.check_output(
'pbpaste', env={'LANG': 'en_US.UTF-8'}).decode('utf-8')
Works on both Python 2.7 and Python 3.4.
2021 Update: If you need to be able to read the clipboard on other operating systems and not just Mac and are okay with adding an external library, pyperclip also seems to work well. I tested it on Mac with Unicode text:
python -m pip install pyperclip
python -c 'import pyperclip; pyperclip.copy("私はDavid!")' # copy
python -c 'import pyperclip; print(repr(pyperclip.paste()))' # paste
A simple way:
cmd = 'echo %s | tr -d "\n" | pbcopy' % str
os.system(cmd)
A cross-platform way:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/4203897/805627
from Tkinter import Tk
r = Tk()
r.withdraw()
r.clipboard_clear()
r.clipboard_append('i can has clipboardz?')
r.destroy()
» pip install pyperclip
What My Project Does
copykitten is a clipboard library with support for text and images and a simple API. It's built around Rust arboard library. Thanks to this, it's multiplatform and doesn't require any dependencies.
Target Audience
Developers building CLI/GUI/TUI applications. The library has beta status on PyPI, but the underlying Rust library is pretty stable, being used in commercial projects like Bitwarden and 1Password.
Comparison
There are lots of other clipboard libraries for Python: pyperclip, jaraco.clipboard, pyclip, just to name a few. However, most of them are not maintained for years and require the presence of additional libraries or tools in the operating system. copykitten doesn't suffer from these shortcomings.
A bit of history
Throughout my years with Python there were several times when I needed to use the clipboard in my applications and every time I had to fall back to some shaky methods like asking the end user to install xclip and calling subprocess.run. This never felt great.
Right now I'm making a multiplayer TUI game (maybe I’ll showcase it later too :) ), where users can copy join game codes into the clipboard to easily share it (much like Among Us). This is how I came to the idea of making such a library. I also wanted to try Rust for a long time, and so this all just clicked in my head instantly.
I had fun building it and definitely had some pain too and learned a bit of nitty-gritty details about how clipboards work in different operating systems. Now I hate Windows.
With this post I hope to gain some attention to the project so that I can receive feedback about the issues and maybe feature requests and spread the word that there's a modern, convenient alternative to the existing packages.
Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/Klavionik/copykitten
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.
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()