Element: paste event
The paste
event is fired when the user has initiated a "paste" action through the browser's user interface.
Bubbles | Yes |
---|---|
Cancelable | Yes |
Interface | ClipboardEvent |
Event handler property | onpaste |
If the cursor is in an editable context (for example, in a <textarea>
or an element with contenteditable
attribute set to true
) then the default action is to insert the contents of the clipboard into the document at the cursor position.
A handler for this event can access the clipboard contents by calling getData()
on the event's clipboardData
property.
To override the default behavior (for example to insert some different data or a transformation of the clipboard contents) an event handler must cancel the default action using event.preventDefault()
, and then insert its desired data manually.
It's possible to construct and dispatch a synthetic paste
event, but this will not affect the document's contents.
Examples
Live example
HTML
<div class="source" contenteditable="true">Try copying text from this box...</div>
<div class="target" contenteditable="true">...and pasting it into this one</div>
JS
const target = document.querySelector('div.target');
target.addEventListener('paste', (event) => {
let paste = (event.clipboardData || window.clipboardData).getData('text');
paste = paste.toUpperCase();
const selection = window.getSelection();
if (!selection.rangeCount) return false;
selection.deleteFromDocument();
selection.getRangeAt(0).insertNode(document.createTextNode(paste));
event.preventDefault();
});
Result
Specifications
Specification |
---|
Clipboard API and events # clipboard-event-paste |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser