Element: copy event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2017.

The copy event of the Clipboard API fires when the user initiates a copy action through the browser's user interface.

The event's default action is to copy the selection (if any) to the clipboard.

A handler for this event can modify the clipboard contents by calling setData(format, data) on the event's ClipboardEvent.clipboardData property, and cancelling the event's default action using event.preventDefault().

However, the handler cannot read the clipboard data.

It's possible to construct and dispatch a synthetic copy event, but this will not affect the system clipboard.

This event bubbles, is cancelable and is composed.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("copy", (event) => {});

oncopy = (event) => {};

Event type

A ClipboardEvent. Inherits from Event.

Examples

Live example

HTML

html

<div class="source" contenteditable="true">Copy text from this box.</div>
<div class="target" contenteditable="true">And paste it into this one.</div>

div.source,
div.target {
  border: 1px solid gray;
  margin: 0.5rem;
  padding: 0.5rem;
  height: 1rem;
  background-color: #e9eef1;
}

JavaScript

const source = document.querySelector("div.source");

source.addEventListener("copy", (event) => {
  const selection = document.getSelection();
  event.clipboardData.setData("text/plain", selection.toString().toUpperCase());
  event.preventDefault();
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
Clipboard API and events # clipboard-event-copy
HTML Standard # handler-oncopy

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser