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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T20:22:09+00:00

How can rich text or HTML source code be obtained from the X clipboard?

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How can rich text or HTML source code be obtained from the X clipboard? For example, if you copy some text from a web browser and paste it into kompozer, it pastes as HTML, with links etc. preserved. However, xclip -o for the same selection just outputs plain text, reformatted in a way similar to that of elinks -dump. I’d like to pull the HTML out and into a text editor (specifically vim).

I asked the same question on superuser.com, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn’t get any informative responses. The X clipboard API is to me yet a mysterious beast; any tips on hacking something up to pull this information are most welcome. My language of choice these days is Python, but pretty much anything is okay.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In X11 you have to communicate with the selection owner, ask about supported formats, and then request data in the specific format. I think the easiest way to do this is using existing windowing toolkits. E,g. with Python and GTK:

    #!/usr/bin/python

import glib, gtk

def test_clipboard():
    clipboard = gtk.Clipboard()
    targets = clipboard.wait_for_targets()
    print "Targets available:", ", ".join(map(str, targets))
    for target in targets:
        print "Trying '%s'..." % str(target)
        contents = clipboard.wait_for_contents(target)
        if contents:
            print contents.data

def main():
    mainloop = glib.MainLoop()
    def cb():
        test_clipboard()
        mainloop.quit()
    glib.idle_add(cb)
    mainloop.run()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

    Output will look like this:

    $ ./clipboard.py 
Targets available: TIMESTAMP, TARGETS, MULTIPLE, text/html, text/_moz_htmlcontext, text/_moz_htmlinfo, UTF8_STRING, COMPOUND_TEXT, TEXT, STRING, text/x-moz-url-priv
...
Trying 'text/html'...
I asked <a href="http://superuser.com/questions/144185/getting-html-source-or-rich-text-from-the-x-clipboard">the same question on superuser.com</a>, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn't get any informative responses.
Trying 'text/_moz_htmlcontext'...
<html><body class="question-page"><div class="container"><div id="content"><div id="mainbar"><div id="question"><table><tbody><tr><td class="postcell"><div><div class="post-text"><p></p></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></div></div></body></html>
...
Trying 'STRING'...
I asked the same question on superuser.com, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn't get any informative responses.
Trying 'text/x-moz-url-priv'...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3261379/getting-html-source-or-rich-text-from-the-x-clipboard
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