Get clipboard contents with Greasemonkey

Question

Is there the possbility to get the textual content of the clipboard to paste it automatically into a textarea clicking a button? Just found a method to copy data to it, but not to read data from it.

Answer 1

No, you cannot do this in javascript because it has proven to be a huge security hole.
Likewise, the developers of Greasemonkey are unlikely to add this capability for the same reasons.

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You can write a Firefox add-on that does this, but I've never seen a (legit) use case.

A technique that works well for me is to have the Greasemonkey script set focus to the textarea (or input) and then I merely press CtrlV. It's super convenient and actually faster than grabbing the mouse to click a button.

Answer 2

You can try to implement this using the clipboard interface.

Please check this out:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Clipboard/readText#example
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Clipboard/write#example