pasteboard 0.1.0.dev1

Pasteboard - Python interface for reading from NSPasteboard (macOS clipboard).

Pasteboard exposes Python bindings for reading macOS’ AppKit NSPasteboard. This allows retrieving different formats (HTML/RTF fragments, PDF/PNG/TIFF) and efficient polling of the pasteboard.

Installation

Obviously, this module will only compile on macOS:

pip install pasteboard

Usage

>>> import pasteboard
>>> pb = pasteboard.Pasteboard()
>>> pb.get_contents()
'pasteboard'
>>> pb.get_contents(diff=True)
>>>

Unsurprisingly, get_contents gets the contents of the pasteboard. This method takes two optional arguments:

type - The format to get. Defaults to pasteboard.String, which corresponds to NSPasteboardTypeString. See the pasteboard module members for other options such as HTML fragment, RTF, PDF, PNG, and TIFF. Not all formats are implemented, such as NSPasteboardTypeColor.

diff - Defaults to False. When True, only get and return the contents if it has changed since the last call. Otherwise, None is returned. This can be used to efficiently monitor the pasteboard for changes, which must be done by polling (there is no option to subscribe to changes).

get_contents will return the appropriate type, so str for string types, and bytes for binary types. None is returned when:

• There is no data of the requested type (e.g. an image was copied but a string was requested).

• diff is True, and the contents has not changed since the last call.

• An error occurred.