How do I capture the input value on a paste event?

Question

On my site users can paste text (in this case a url) into an input field. I\'d like to capture the value of the text that was pasted using jQuery. I\'ve got this to work in

Answer 1

Listen for the change event as well as paste. change will reliably fire on a changed field before submission, whereas paste only happens on browsers that support it on an explicit paste; it won't be triggered by other editing actions such as drag-and-drop, cut-copy, undo-redo, spellcheck, IME substitution etc.

The problem with change is that it doesn't fire straight away, only when editing in a field is finished. If you want to catch all changes as they happen, the event would be input... except that this is a new HTML5 feature that isn't supported everywhere (notably: IE<9). You could nearly do it by catching all these events:

$('.url').bind('input change paste keyup mouseup',function(e){
    ...
});

But if you want to definitely catch every change quickly on browsers that don't support input, you have no choice but to poll the value on a setInterval.

Answer 2

jQuery has a problem with the live-method with the paste-event in the IE; workaround:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $(".url").bind('paste', function(event) {
        var _this = this;
        // Short pause to wait for paste to complete
        setTimeout( function() {
            var text = $(_this).val();
            $(".display").html(text);
        }, 100);
    });
});

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/Trg9F/

Answer 3

$('input').on('paste', function(e) {
    // common browser -> e.originalEvent.clipboardData
    // uncommon browser -> window.clipboardData
    var clipboardData = e.clipboardData || e.originalEvent.clipboardData || window.clipboardData;
    var pastedData = clipboardData.getData('text');
});

Answer 4

Even better is it to use e.originalEvent.clipboardData.getData('text'); to retrieve pasted data;

$("input").on("paste", function(e) { 
    var pastedData = e.originalEvent.clipboardData.getData('text');
    // ... now do with pastedData whatever you like ...
});

This way you can avoid timeouts and it is supported on all major browsers.

Answer 5

Maybe try using the onblur event instead. So the user c/p into the input and when they leave the field the script checks what's there. This could save a whole lot of hassle, since it works for mouse and key c/p as well as manually entered input.