Copy and Paste with Clipboard from PowerShell
September 3, 2010 16 Comments
Many times I want to use PowerShell to manipulate some text that I have in something else like email or a text editor or some such or conversely, I do something at the command line and I want to paste the output into a document of some kind.
I’m not sure why there is no cmdlet for outputting to clipboard.
PS> get-command out-* CommandType Name Definition ----------- ---- ---------- Cmdlet Out-Default Out-Default [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-Verbose]... Cmdlet Out-File Out-File [-FilePath] <String> [[-Encoding] <Stri... Cmdlet Out-GridView Out-GridView [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-Title <... Cmdlet Out-Host Out-Host [-Paging] [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-V... Cmdlet Out-Null Out-Null [-InputObject <PSObject>] [-Verbose] [-... Cmdlet Out-Printer Out-Printer [[-Name] <String>] [-InputObject <PS... Cmdlet Out-String Out-String [-Stream] [-Width <Int32>] [-InputObj...
Fortunately, though Windows ships with a native clip.exe for piping text to clipboard. You can alias it to out-clipboard or just pipe to “clip”.
new-alias Out-Clipboard $env:SystemRoot\system32\clip.exe
Now you can just pipe to Out-Clipboard or clip just like the other Out-* cmdlets.
The larger issue is that PowerShell doesn’t expose a way to paste text from the clipboard. However, the WinForms API of the .NET Framework has a GetText() static method on the System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard class. There is a catch, though:
The Clipboard class can only be used in threads set to single thread apartment (STA) mode. To use this class, ensure that your Main method is marked with the STAThreadAttribute attribute.
This is unfortunate because PowerShell runs in a multithreaded apartment by default which means that the workaround is to spin up a new PowerShell process which is slow.
function Get-ClipboardText()
{
$command =
{
add-type -an system.windows.forms
[System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard]::GetText()
}
powershell -sta -noprofile -command $command
}
A slightly less obvious approach is to paste the text from the clipboard into a non-visual instance of the System.Windows.Forms.Textbox control and then emit the text of the control to the console. This works fine in a standard PowerShell process and is substantially faster than spinning up a new process.
function Get-ClipboardText()
{
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
$tb = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$tb.Multiline = $true
$tb.Paste()
$tb.Text
}
The TextBox method is about 500 times faster than the sub-process method. On my system, it takes 0.501 seconds to do spin up the sub-process and emit the text from the clipboard versus 0.001 seconds to use the TextBox control in the current process.
I also alias this function to “paste”. The commands I actually type and remember are “clip” and “paste”.
When using paste, I generally am setting a variable or inserting my pasted text into a pipeline within parens.
CAVEAT: Whenever you capture a value without any {CR}{LF}, the clipboard will add it. You may need to trim the newline to get the behavior you expect when pasting into a pipeline.
Here’s some one-liners to illustrate. I have dig from BIND in my path and I have Select-String aliased to grep. Notice how when I paste the IP address I captured to the clipboard from the one-liner gets pasted back with an extra blank line.
PS> ((dig google.com) | grep '^google\.com') -match '(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)$' | out-null; $matches[0]
72.14.235.104
PS> ((dig google.com) | grep '^google\.com') -match '(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)$' | out-null; $matches[0] | clip
PS> paste
72.14.235.104
PS> ping (paste)
Ping request could not find host 72.14.235.104
. Please check the name and try again.
PS> ping (paste).trim()
Pinging 72.14.235.104 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=192ms TTL=51
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=208ms TTL=51
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=212ms TTL=51
Reply from 72.14.235.104: bytes=32 time=210ms TTL=51
Ping statistics for 72.14.235.104:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 192ms, Maximum = 212ms, Average = 205ms
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Hey, Thanks for sharing what you found. I found a way to stay within the realms of Powershell. I need to enhance it so it takes the text as an input variable, but here’s what I got so far.
##################################################################################################################
# Copy-Text.ps1
#
# The script copies a string variable to system clipboard.
# Credit: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2009/01/12/copy-console-screen-to-system-clipboard.aspx
$text = “This is my text”
# Load System.Windows.Forms assembly.
$null = [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“System.Windows.Forms”)
# Create data object.
$dataObject = New-Object windows.forms.dataobject
# Add generated strings to data object.
$dataObject.SetData([Windows.Forms.DataFormats]::UnicodeText, $true, $text)
# Put data object in system clipboard.
[Windows.Forms.Clipboard]::SetDataObject($dataObject, $true)
‘The text has been copied to system clipboard.’
‘You can now paste it to any application that supports text.’
Oh yeah, you have to run it differently.
> powershell -noprofile -sta -command .\Copy-Text.ps1
Thanks for the alias and the script!!!
I opened up a connect bug to add native cmdlets and a PSDrive for accessing the clipboard. If you think that would be a good idea you can vote on the issue: https://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell/feedback/details/651777/implement-cmdlets-to-get-data-in-and-out-of-the-windows-clipboard
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This is a very useful powershell feature, and your usage of Dig and Grep just blew my mind a bit. It suddenly stopped looking like a PoSh command line and more like Bash.
PowerShell3.0 have the Out-Clipboard built in
Unfortunately, there is no Out-Clipboard cmdlet in PowerShell 3.0 on Windows Server 2012 gold.
This will copy the clipboard to $crt:
$crt = PowerShell -NoProfile -STA -Command {
Add-Type -Assembly PresentationCore
[Windows.Clipboard]::GetText()
Nice one. Just need that last
# I modified it so the output is a stream of strings
# which makes line based piping operations a breeze
# this is in line with the output of the paste.exe implementation found here
# http://huddledmasses.org/clipexe-and-the-missing-pasteexe/
function Get-ClipboardText()
{
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
$tb = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$tb.Multiline = $true
$tb.Paste()
$tb.Text.Split([string[]](“`r`n”,”`n”,”`r”),[StringSplitOptions]’None’)
}
new-alias paste get-clipboardtext
# trim the whitespace from whatever’s on the clipboard and put it back
paste | %{ $_.Trim() } | clip
# get the values from the third column of tab-delimited text on the clipboard
# (e.g. copied from Excel)
$col3array = paste | %{ $values = $_ -split “`t”; $values[2] }
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I realize this is an old post but google ranked it first for my search query so…
As of PowerShell 5.0 there are now Get-Clipboard and Set-Clipboard cmdlets.
I know this is extremely old at this point, but I’ve been using this workaround in a script for several years now (thank you, by the way) and only just today noticed a limitation with the faster TextBox method: You can only fit 32767 characters in a TextBox. It is apparently a hard limitation according to Microsoft’s documentation. If you copied more characters than that, use the first method instead. It is about 100x slower, but it’s still only about 1 second.
If you’re concerned about performance but don’t want to lose any data, just add both functions to your script (the second one named Get-ClipboardTextBox, the first named Get-ClipboardText in my example) then add this quick check to only run the slower function when needed:
$rawOutput = Get-ClipboardTextBox
if ($rawOutput.Length -eq 32767) {
$rawOutput = Get-ClipboardText
}
You can then format the output as needed. I personally use…
[Array]$array = $rawOutput.Split(“`n”) | % {$_.Trim()} | ? {$_}
…to format it as an array and eliminate any white space or blank lines. I also have a -Regex switch parameter to optionally format it as Regex instead. Very useful for quickly searching multiple strings with -match.
if ($regex) {
# Sanitize input
[Array]$regexArray = foreach ($line in $array) { ([Regex]::Escape($line)) }
[Regex]$regexArray = ‘(?i)(‘ + ($regexArray -join ‘|’) + ‘)’
$regexArray
}
else {
$array
}
While we don’t need any of this nonsense in new versions of PowerShell, unfortunately some of us are stuck supporting old servers that can’t upgrade WMF.