I got tired of not having a good cross-platform module for accessing the clipboard in Python, so I put this together. It is a module that loads a copy() and paste() function depending on what your operating system (or window manager) is.

It has the following requirements:

Windows – No requirements. You don’t need the win32 module installed.

– No requirements. You don’t need the win32 module installed. Mac – Requires the pbcopy and pbpaste, which come with OS X.

– Requires the pbcopy and pbpaste, which come with OS X. Linux – Requires the xclip command, which possibly comes with the os. If not, run sudo apt-get install xclip . Or have the gtk or PyQt4 modules installed. Also can use the xsel command.

– Requires the xclip command, which possibly comes with the os. If not, run . Or have the gtk or PyQt4 modules installed. Also can use the xsel command. Pyperclip runs on both Python 2 and Python 3.

Usage is simple:



import pyperclip

pyperclip.copy('The text to be copied to the clipboard.')

spam = pyperclip.paste()

UPDATE: (8/16/2014) Download Pyperclip from PyPI.

UPDATE: (9/13/2011) I’ve fixed a small TypeError that some people were coming across that Gustav pointed out below.

UPDATE: Kenneth Reitz pointed out that he’s coded a similar module called Xerox. I missed it in my prior art search. http://github.com/kennethreitz/xerox It seems to have a fairly similar implementation as Pyperclip, except requires the win32 Python module to work on Windows.

I’m busy trying to figure out X11 programming so I can get rid of the xclip dependency.