How do I read text from the Windows clipboard in Python?

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/

I’ve seen many suggestions to use the win32 module, but Tkinter provides the shortest and easiest method I’ve seen, as in this post: How do I copy a string to the clipboard on Windows using Python?

Plus, Tkinter is in the python standard library.

The most upvoted answer above is weird in a way that it simply clears the Clipboard and then gets the content (which is then empty). One could clear the clipboard to be sure that some clipboard content type like “formated text” does not “cover” your plain text content you want to save in the clipboard.

The following piece of code replaces all newlines in the clipboard by spaces, then removes all double spaces and finally saves the content back to the clipboard:

import win32clipboard

win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
c = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
c = c.replace('n', ' ')
c = c.replace('r', ' ')
while c.find('  ') != -1:
    c = c.replace('  ', ' ')
win32clipboard.SetClipboardText(c)
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()

If you don’t want to install extra packages, ctypes can get the job done as well.

import ctypes

CF_TEXT = 1

kernel32 = ctypes.windll.kernel32
kernel32.GlobalLock.argtypes = [ctypes.c_void_p]
kernel32.GlobalLock.restype = ctypes.c_void_p
kernel32.GlobalUnlock.argtypes = [ctypes.c_void_p]
user32 = ctypes.windll.user32
user32.GetClipboardData.restype = ctypes.c_void_p

def get_clipboard_text():
    user32.OpenClipboard(0)
    try:
        if user32.IsClipboardFormatAvailable(CF_TEXT):
            data = user32.GetClipboardData(CF_TEXT)
            data_locked = kernel32.GlobalLock(data)
            text = ctypes.c_char_p(data_locked)
            value = text.value
            kernel32.GlobalUnlock(data_locked)
            return value
    finally:
        user32.CloseClipboard()

print(get_clipboard_text())

you can easily get this done through the built-in module Tkinter which is basically a GUI library. This code creates a blank widget to get the clipboard content from OS.

from tkinter import Tk  # Python 3
#from Tkinter import Tk # for Python 2.x
Tk().clipboard_get()

For my console program the answers with tkinter above did not quite work for me because the .destroy() always gave an error,:

can’t invoke “event” command: application has been destroyed while executing…

or when using .withdraw() the console window did not get the focus back.

To solve this you also have to call .update() before the .destroy(). Example:

# Python 3
import tkinter

r = tkinter.Tk()
text = r.clipboard_get()
r.withdraw()
r.update()
r.destroy()

The r.withdraw() prevents the frame from showing for a milisecond, and then it will be destroyed giving the focus back to the console.

Use Pythons library Clipboard

Its simply used like this:

import clipboard
clipboard.copy("this text is now in the clipboard")
print clipboard.paste()  

I found pyperclip to be the easiest way to get access to the clipboard from python:

1. Install pyperclip:
   pip install pyperclip

2. Usage:

import pyperclip
    
s = pyperclip.paste()
pyperclip.copy(s)
    
# the type of s is string

With supports Windows, Linux and Mac, and seems to work with non-ASCII characters, too.
Tested characters include ±°©©αβγθΔΨΦåäö

The python standard library does it…

try:
    # Python3
    import tkinter as tk
except ImportError:
    # Python2
    import Tkinter as tk

def getClipboardText():
    root = tk.Tk()
    # keep the window from showing
    root.withdraw()
    return root.clipboard_get()

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)

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()

Why not try calling powershell?

import subprocess

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