How to get HTML data out of of the OS X pasteboard / clipboard?

Question

I do have to send a report regarding pasting some clipboard content into a web rich editor and I need a way to dump/restore the clipboard content to (probably) HTML.

Answer 1

Three years later, in more civilized times, we have Swift. You can write a short Swift script to pull exactly what you need off of OS X's pasteboard.

Put the following Swift 4 snippet into a new text file. I named mine pbpaste.swift:

import Cocoa
let type = NSPasteboard.PasteboardType.html
if let string = NSPasteboard.general.string(forType:type) {
  print(string)
}
else {
  print("Could not find string data of type '\(type)' on the system pasteboard")
  exit(1)
}

Then, copy some html, and run swift pbpaste.swift from the directory where you put that file.

Yay, html! Uggh, OS X added a ton of custom markup (and a tag?!) — but hey, at least it's not plain text!

Notes:

• NSPasteboard.PasteboardType.html is a special global that evaluates to the string "public.html"
• Obviously this is html specific, so you'd probably want to either:
  1. Name it pbpaste-html.swift, or
  2. Read the desired type from the command line arguments

• It's kind of slow, because it's being interpreted on the fly, not compiled and executed. Compilation gives me a 10x speed-up:

  xcrun -sdk macosx swiftc pbpaste.swift -o pbpaste-html
  

  Then just call ./pbpaste-html instead of swift pbpaste.swift.