getting HTML source or rich text from the X clipboard

user_192812 0
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How can rich text or HTML source code be obtained from the X clipboard? For example, if you copy some text from a web browser and paste it into kompozer, it pastes as HTML, with links etc. preserved. However, xclip -o for the same selection just outputs plain text, reformatted in a way similar to that of elinks -dump. I'd like to pull the HTML out and into a text editor (specifically vim).

I asked the same question on superuser.com, because I was hoping there was a utility to do this, but I didn't get any informative responses. The X clipboard API is to me yet a mysterious beast; any tips on hacking something up to pull this information are most welcome. My language of choice these days is Python, but pretty much anything is okay.

xorg clipboard browser linux html
3 Answers

Extending the ideas from Stephane Chazelas, you can:

  • Copy from the formatted source.
  • Run this command to extract from the clipboard, convert to HTML, and then (with a pipe |) put that HTML back in the clipboard, again using the same xclip:
xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html | xclip -selection clipboard
  • Next, when you paste with Ctrl+v, it will paste the HTML source.

Going further, you can make it a shortcut, so that you don't have to open the terminal and run the exact command each time. ✨

To do that:

  • Open the settings for your OS (in my case it's Ubuntu)
  • Find the section for the Keyboard
  • Then find the section for shortcuts
  • Create a new shortcut
  • Set a Name, e.g.: Copy as HTML
  • Then as the command for the shortcut, put:
bash -c "xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html | xclip -selection clipboard"

Note: notice that it's the same command as above, but put inside of an inline Bash script. This is necessary to be able to use the | (pipe) to send the output from one command as input to the next.

  • Set the shortcut to whatever combination you want, preferably not overwriting another shortcut you use. In my case, I set it to: Ctrl+Shift+c
  • After this, you can copy some formatted text as normally with: Ctrl+c
  • And then, before pasting it, convert it to HTML with: Ctrl+Shift+c
  • Next, when you paste it with: Ctrl+v, it will paste the contents as HTML. ✨

Shortcut edition window

user_2195300
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