This tutorial is now out of date. I advise you to sue the default browser copy and paste functionality you can find out more information here Javascript copy and paste
In a recent project I needed to create a button that would copy some text onto the user's clipboard. As I was going to build this on the click event of a button I wanted to do this with Javascript or jQuery. After doing some research into this I found that JavaScript copy to clipboard wasn't available because of security which also meant that jQuery would not be able to copy the text to clipboard, so I had to find a different way. After much searching I found a jQuery plugin that is hosted on Github called ZeroClipboard.
This is a library that provides you with a way of coping text to your clipboard using Adobe flash and a Javascript interface. Flash can access your computers clipboard because you have to install flash and agree to the security settings, therefore we have to use flash to access the clipboard. We can use Javascript as an interface to flash so we can start this off with a click event on a button. You can download ZeroClipboard from it's project page on Github. ZeroClipboard Github actually uses the ZeroClipboard project on their own site to allow you to copy the URL of the repository.
How To Use ZeroClipboard
First you need to download both the Javascript and the flash file from the ZeroClipboard repository. Then you can add this to your page by just including some Javascript files.
<html>
<body>
<script src="ZeroClipboard.js"></script>
<script src="main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
In the main.js file you then need to create the client used in the ZeroClipboard to copy the text to the clipboard.
// main.js
var client = new ZeroClipboard( document.getElementById("copy-button"), {
moviePath: "/path/to/ZeroClipboard.swf"
} );
client.on( "load", function(client) {
// alert( "movie is loaded" );
client.on( "complete", function(client, args) {
// `this` is the element that was clicked
this.style.display = "none";
alert("Copied text to clipboard: " + args.text );
} );
} );
The following examples will show you 3 different ways you can set the text to copy, you can either set the text in the Javascript, set a target area to copy the text, or set the text with a HTML data-attribute.
Set Text In Code
To set the text in the Javascript code you first new a button so that we can attach a click event.
<button id="click-to-copy">Click To Copy</button>
In the Javascript we can setup the ZeroClipboard client and set the text on the click event of the button. First we need to setup the ZeroClipboard client and attach the movie path for the SWF file. We just need to pass in the JQuery object of the button into the constructor of the ZeroClipboard object.
var client = new ZeroClipboard( $("#click-to-copy"), {
moviePath: "zeroclipboard/ZeroClipboard.swf",
debug: false
} );
Using this client object we can now set the text on the click event of the ZeroClipboard button. We can use the setText() method to set the text in the Javascript code.
client.on( "load", function(client)
{
$('#flash-loaded').fadeIn();
client.on( "complete", function(client, args) {
client.setText( "Set text copied." );
$('#click-to-copy-text').fadeIn();
} );
} );
Set Copy Target
The copy target allows you to define a HTML element that you can get the text to copy, the value that it will use can either be the value of the element, the innerHTML or the textContent. This works off a data attribute of data-clipboard-target with a value of the ID of element you want to copy.
<button id="target-to-copy" data-clipboard-target="clipboard-text">Click To Copy</button>
<textarea name="clipboard-text" id="clipboard-text" cols="30" rows="10">
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus mattis lacus nibh, ac sollicitudin sapien accumsan in. Mauris euismod posuere tellus luctus sodales.
Fusce a consectetur massa, non tincidunt mauris. Phasellus a rutrum libero. Praesent tempus urna et nisi aliquam convallis. Fusce porttitor justo condimentum orci euismod, pulvinar congue magna vestibulum.
Sed gravida eleifend justo, id ultrices tellus porttitor nec. Nam porttitor gravida tempor. In libero ante, euismod ac fermentum nec, gravida ut dolor. Nullam a pulvinar ligula.
Phasellus euismod rutrum risus non dapibus. Nullam pretium mauris vel fringilla pretium. Mauris faucibus risus vitae nulla dignissim imperdiet.
Pellentesque elementum venenatis arcu, ut bibendum risus varius nec. Fusce eu tincidunt nunc. Duis sagittis dolor congue mauris tincidunt, eu condimentum eros rhoncus.
</textarea>
We setup the ZeroClipboard client to be attached to the target-to-copy button. ZeroClipboard will search for the data-clipboard-target attribute and use this value to get the text to copy.
var clientTarget = new ZeroClipboard( $("#target-to-copy"), {
moviePath: "http://www.paulund.co.uk/playground/demo/zeroclipboard-demo/zeroclipboard/ZeroClipboard.swf",
debug: false
} );
clientTarget.on( "load", function(clientTarget)
{
$('#flash-loaded').fadeIn();
clientTarget.on( "complete", function(clientTarget, args) {
clientTarget.setText( args.text );
$('#target-to-copy-text').fadeIn();
} );
} );
This still uses the setText() method but the set it use will text that is sent through using the args.text property.
Set Copy Text
The set copy text button will use another data attribute which will define the text to copy.
<button id="text-to-copy" data-clipboard-text="Click To Copy!">Click To Copy</button>
The Javascript that we need for this is the same as the target example, the code we need to code is placed in the args.text property, then we can use this in the setText() method to copy to the clipboard.
var clientText = new ZeroClipboard( $("#text-to-copy"), {
moviePath: "http://www.paulund.co.uk/playground/demo/zeroclipboard-demo/zeroclipboard/ZeroClipboard.swf",
debug: false
} );
clientText.on( "load", function(clientText)
{
$('#flash-loaded').fadeIn();
clientText.on( "complete", function(clientText, args) {
clientText.setText( args.text );
$('#text-to-copy-text').fadeIn();
} );
} );
Full ZeroClipboard Documentation
For full documentation of how to use ZeroClipboard view the updated version on the Github Project page. ZeroClipboard Documentation