How do I read text from the clipboard?

You can use the module called win32clipboard, which is part of pywin32.

Here is an example that first sets the clipboard data then gets it:

import win32clipboard

# set clipboard data
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
win32clipboard.SetClipboardText('testing 123')
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()

# get clipboard data
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
data = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
print data

An important reminder from the documentation:

When the window has finished examining or changing the clipboard, close the clipboard by calling CloseClipboard. This enables other windows to access the clipboard. Do not place an object on the clipboard after calling CloseClipboard.

Try win32clipboard from the win32all package (that's probably installed if you're on ActiveState Python).

See sample here: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/474121/

A not very direct trick:

Use pyautogui hotkey:

Import pyautogui
pyautogui.hotkey('ctrl', 'v')

Therefore, you can paste the clipboard data as you like.

After whole 12 years, I have a solution and you can use it without installing any package.

from tkinter import Tk, TclError
from time import sleep

while True:
    try:
        clipboard = Tk().clipboard_get()
        print(clipboard)
        sleep(5)
    except TclError:
        print("Clipboard is empty.")
        sleep(5)

Why not try calling powershell?

import subprocess

def getClipboard():
    ret = subprocess.getoutput("powershell.exe -Command Get-Clipboard")
    return ret

For users of Anaconda: distributions don't come with pyperclip, but they do come with pandas which redistributes pyperclip:

>>> from pandas.io.clipboard import clipboard_get, clipboard_set
>>> clipboard_get()
'from pandas.io.clipboard import clipboard_get, clipboard_set'
>>> clipboard_set("Hello clipboard!")
>>> clipboard_get()
'Hello clipboard!'

I find this easier to use than pywin32 (which is also included in distributions).

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_clipboard()