Get readable text only from clipboard

Question

I already know how to get plain text from the clipboard in Java, but sometimes the text is encoded in some weird DataFlavor, like when copying from Microsoft Word or from a website or even source code from Eclipse.

How to extract pure plain text from these DataFlavors?

Answer 1

import java.awt.HeadlessException;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.datatransfer.DataFlavor;
import java.awt.datatransfer.UnsupportedFlavorException;
import java.io.IOException;

String data = (String) Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit()
                .getSystemClipboard().getData(DataFlavor.stringFlavor); 

with the getData() Method and the stringFlavor you should get plain Text from the clipboard.

if there are weird text in the clipboard, i think, this should a problem of the programm which puts the data in the clipboard.

Answer 2

You can use following method getting clipboard text in Java:

public String getClipBoard(){
    try {
        return (String)Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().getData(DataFlavor.stringFlavor);
    } catch (HeadlessException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();            
    } catch (UnsupportedFlavorException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();            
    } catch (IOException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return "";
}

Answer 3

First I haven't worked with clipboard but this seems intresting

From http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/java/awt/ch16_01.htm

"To read data from the clipboard, a program calls the Transferable.getTransferData() method. If the data is represented by a DataFlavor that doesn't correspond to a Java class (for example, plainTextFlavor), getTransferData() returns an InputStream for you to read the data from."

So if you give it a class which doesn't correspont you get the InputStream and then you can read the "pure" text from the InputStream yourself.