Add a special message when users copy text

Have you ever wanted to add a special message or attribution when users copy text from your website? For instance, when users select text and press Ctrl + C you might want to include the original website. That way, if users paste the content elsewhere, they'll see a message like this:

The original text



Copied from https://www.yourwebsite.com

In this post, we'll learn how to achieve this specific behavior using JavaScript DOM. Typically, this behavior isn't applied to the entire page. Instead, it's used when users copy text from the main content section of the page. We'll assume that the markup has an element with the id of content.

<div id="content">

    ...

</div>

Alright, let's dive in!

To select an element using JavaScript, we can use the getElementById method or any other method that fits your needs.

const contentEle = document.getElementById('content');

Handling the copy event

Now it's time to handle the copy event, which occurs when the user copies the text.

contentEle.addEventListener('copy', (e) => {

    // We will add a custom message here ...

});

Modifying the clipboard data

Within the event listener, we can modify the data that gets copied to the clipboard by using the ClipboardEvent.clipboardData property.

Unfortunately, the selected text cannot be obtained using the clipboardData.getData() function. It's only available when we handle the other events such as paste.

Fortunately, there's another way to for more details.

Voila! With just a few lines of JavaScript DOM code, you can add a custom message to the text that users copy from your website.

Here's a live demonstration that you can play with! Check it out!

See also

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• to play with the interactive demos.
  
  
  

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