Tuesday, February 16, 2010

HTML in clipboard

It turns out copying/pasting hyperlinks to the windows clipboard isn't as easy as just copying the unformatted HTML. Turns out you need some crazy format inside of the clipboard for an application that handles HTML copy/paste to actually recognize it. Originally I looked for a solution using the Microsoft Office clipboard since that is where the html from the clipboard was going to be pasted to anyways, but it turns out there is no longer an object model for the office clipboard in versions past 2000. I ended up finding the solution to copy/pasting HTML in windows HTML Clipboard format.

This is what the clipboard actually looks like when you have HTML as your format in the clipboard:


Version:0.9
    StartHTML:71
    EndHTML:170
    StartFragment:140
    EndFragment:160
    StartSelection:140
    EndSelection:160
    <!DOCTYPE>
    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    <TITLE> The HTML Clipboard</TITLE>
    <BASE HREF="http://sample/specs">
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>
    <UL>
    <!--StartFragment -->
    <LI> The Fragment </LI>
    <!--EndFragment -->
    </UL>
    </BODY>
    </HTML>



Some more information on the HTML clipboard format can be found Here
Standard clipboard formats can be found Here

To implement the HTML clipboard in python, I found a class Phillip Piper had written that does exactly what I need, that code can be found Here.

Also in my search I ran across this python script called PathCatcher - From the Doc String : PathCatcher is a Windows utility that allows one to right-click on
a folder or a file in Explorer and save its path to the clipboard. PathCatcher can be located Here
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