How does X11 clipboard handle multiple data formats?

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It probably happened to you as well - sometimes when you copy a text from some web page into your rich-text e-mail draft in your favorite webmail client, you dislike the fact that the pasted piece has a different font/size/weight.. it somehow remembers the style (often images, when selected). How is it than that if you paste the same into your favorite text editor like Vim, there's no HTML, just the plain text?

alt text

It seems that clipboard maintains the selected data in various formats. How can one access data in any one of those formats (programmatically or with some utility)? How does the X11 clipboard work?

xorg clipboard x11 text
2 Answers

The code in Havoc P's answer to show the formats of the current clipboard sadly no longer works due to an API change in PyGTK. Here's an updated version as a one-liner:

python -c 'import gi; gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0"); from gi.repository import Gtk, Gdk; print(*Gtk.Clipboard.get(Gdk.atom_intern("CLIPBOARD", True)).wait_for_targets()[1], sep = "\n")'

In Arch Linux, you can install PyGTK using sudo pacman -S pygtk.

Below are some examples.

Text from Chrome:

TIMESTAMP
TARGETS
SAVE_TARGETS
MULTIPLE
STRING
UTF8_STRING
TEXT
text/html
text/plain

Text from Gnome Terminal:

TIMESTAMP
TARGETS
MULTIPLE
SAVE_TARGETS
UTF8_STRING
COMPOUND_TEXT
TEXT
STRING
text/plain;charset=utf-8
text/plain
user_12397740
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