Question

I need to make an application which copies the highlighted text .

I tried this program

String myString = "This text will be copied into clipboard when running this code!";
StringSelection stringSelection = new StringSelection (myString);
Clipboard clpbrd = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit ().getSystemClipboard ();
clpbrd.setContents (stringSelection, null);

but this copies the text already existing in clipboard
it prints the text from clipboard after we highlight the text and hit copy option

I want to know after we simply select a text by highlighting, where is this stored, how can I access this highlighted text directly without physically copying it by OS’s copy option

Answer 1

You can listen to selection changes using the CaretListener. Then you can retrieve the selected Text using the #getSelectedText().

Here is a simple example with a TextArea:

    final JTextArea textArea = new JTextArea();
    textArea.addCaretListener(new CaretListener() {
        @Override
        public void caretUpdate(CaretEvent e) {
            String selectedText = textArea.getSelectedText();
            // do something with it...
        }
    });