How can I, using Python (2.7) get the contents of the Mac clipboard. Is there a better way than making a wrapper around pbpaste?
Thanks!
6 Answers
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.
1 Comment
magicrebirth
On Py3, OS 11.1:
print("Pastboard string: %s" % pbstring)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'
1 Comment
alexis
Maybe a little too light: On OS X, the
xerox module is just a wrapper around pbcopy and pbpaste.If you have installed pandas, you can use the function in pandas as follows:
from pandas.io.clipboard import clipboard_get
text = clipboard_get()
Comments
The problem with the xerox module and most code samples I've found for "get the contents of the Mac clipboard" is that they return plain text only. They don't support hyperlinks, styles, and such, so they're not really able to access the full contents provided by apps like Microsoft Word and Google Chrome.
Standing on the shoulders of others, I finally figured out how to do this. The resulting richxerox module is available on PyPI and Bitbucket.
Though this question is old, I'm leaving breadcrumbs here because I consistently re-found this page via Google while searching for the answer.
5 Comments
alexis
richxerox looks great! I've been looking for something like this. Annoying glitch: though it installs on Python 3, it's Python 2 code. Why? It's easily upgraded.alexis
I mean that the version that
pip installed (0.129) has print statements without parentheses, it has iteritems(), etc. It's not compatible with python 3, and errors out on import richxerox. Is there a version I can ask pip for what will work? Which one? (I'm asking this because I saw a months-old bug report about recent versions being broken).alexis
Ha, I guess it's a semantics problem:
129 > 6 :-) I'll fetch the correct version, thanks. (Unfortunately pip failed to build PyObjC on my El Capitan box, so I won't be able to actually test it with python 3.)alexis
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
Jason R. Coombs
Also consider using jaraco.clipboard, which on Mac uses richxerox (and excludes the old versions like 0.129) and provides the same interface on Windows.
Do you know PyObjC? I guess you could use it to write a Py wrapper which interfaces with NSPasteboard. This might be more "elegant" than shelling out to pbpaste.
You can grab the clipboard (and the screen) with PIL/Pillow on a Mac like this:
from PIL import ImageGrab, Image
# Grab clipboard and save to disk
clip = ImageGrab.grabclipboard()
clip.save("clip.png")
Just for completeness, you can grab the screen like this:
screen = ImageGrab.grab()
# That results in this:
# <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGBA size=5120x2880 at 0x110BB7748>
# Save to disk
screen.save("screen.png")
