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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T11:53:42+00:00

Scenario: I’m trying to intercept paste events inside a textarea/input text, and filter the

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Scenario: I’m trying to intercept paste events inside a textarea/input text, and filter the content being pasted.

Webkit/IE are handled rather well, as I can attach code to the onpaste event, and then read from the clipboard what is being pasted. Plenty of examples around.

Gecko is trickier, because as far as I know it isn’t possible to read the clipboard content on Firefox (unless somebody knows a workaround for that?)
I just use the input swap trick for that.

Opera is being annoying tho. I can trap CTRL+V and SHIFT+INS, but there’s no onpaste event.
Not to mention any sort of clipboard interaction, apparently.

So, my question is:

Can I detect if the user clicked on paste in the context menu on Opera? Is there any other way to detect the event?

EDIT:

Thanks everybody for the answers – they all add a good input, even if there’s no definitive solution.
Having to choose, I’ll pick the only one that tried to address the original question, and that would probably work if it wasn’t too much of an hack to even try.

Notes for those that have my same problem (input filtering):

  • it is possible to capture content being dragged: mouseup + setTimeout does the trick everywhere almost perfectly.
  • without flash, there is probably no solution bar polling. Even with flash, it’s not a completely solid solution either. Too much effort to support 100% of the cases.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would like to point out DOJO menu widget that is creating context menus perfectly in different browsers. http://www.dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/Menu.html#dijit-menu

    What you can do is that detect paste event in browsers that are supporting it and override context menu in browsers that are not supporting this event like opera.

    Once you create your own context menu then you can add copy paste menu item or create context menu similar to the default using css.

    Edited
    Some browsers might not allow us to fetch clipboard content, in this case we can always revert back to flash for borrowing some of its features that are cross browser. See couple of links I posted in comments.

    Its complete implementation might have more issues than anticipated but it is possible and we can always give it a try (I will for sure).

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