Python and the clipboard

I liked the idea (found via Alex) of modifying clipboard data in place, and decided to steal it for my own use, in python, on win32 and ubuntu. Since it was surprisingly annoying to figure out how to use the clipboard in either case, I’ll post what I ended up with, so that I can find it again myself.

This works with gtk or win32; the latter requires pywin32:

#! /usr/bin/env python2.5

from __future__ import with_statement
from contextlib import contextmanager

try:
    import win32clipboard as wcb
    import win32con

    @contextmanager
    def WinClipboard():
        """
        A context manager for using the windows clipboard safely.
        """
        try:
            wcb.OpenClipboard()
            yield
        finally:
            wcb.CloseClipboard()

    def getcbtext():
        with WinClipboard():
            return wcb.GetClipboardData(win32con.CF_TEXT)

    def setcbtext(text):
        with WinClipboard():
            wcb.EmptyClipboard()
            wcb.SetClipboardText(text)

except ImportError, e:
    # try gtk.  If that doesn't work, just let the exception go
    import gtk

    def getcbtext():
        return gtk.Clipboard().wait_for_text()

    def setcbtext(text):
        cb = gtk.Clipboard()
        cb.set_text(text)
        cb.store()

def replaceclipboard(fn):
    """
    Modify text on the clipboard.

    fn: a callable object that maps strings to strings.

    >>> setcbtext("This is some text.")
    >>> replaceclipboard(lambda s : s.upper())
    >>> getcbtext()
    'THIS IS SOME TEXT.'
    """
    text = getcbtext()
    newtext = fn(text)
    setcbtext(newtext)

def _test():
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    _test()

Tags: Programming, python