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

I realise you've already found this, but for the benefit of people who turn up here from Google, the solution given for RTF data at Getting RTF data out of Mac OS X pasteboard (clipboard) works fine for getting HTML out of the clipboard, too.

That is, the command

osascript -e 'the clipboard as «class HTML»' |   perl -ne 'print chr foreach unpack("C*",pack("H*",substr($_,11,-3)))'

Answer 2

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 <meta> 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.