This is an age-old question, but I'm still having trouble with it. You see, I'm trying to paste some Excel data in a Text Area, but the silly browsers freeze for long periods of time when doing this, because of God-knows-what "smart" parsing they do. I can't get rid of that (file upload is out of the question, my boss wants me to paste rows from Excel in a Text Area).

The good news is that pasting in a standard textbox WORKS. But I can't force them to paste there. So I am trying to catch the paste event in the Text Area and then throw the text over to the textbox. Unfortunately, I stopped short at the pasting part. I can't paste the text via JS into the simple textbox.

So my question is: how do you paste a text, how do you invoke it via JS? There are some solutions which only work in IE, that's not good, of course ::- ).

This is an age-old question, but I'm still having trouble with it. You see, I'm trying to paste some Excel data in a Text Area, but the silly browsers freeze for long periods of time when doing this, because of God-knows-what "smart" parsing they do. I can't get rid of that (file upload is out of the question, my boss wants me to paste rows from Excel in a Text Area).

The good news is that pasting in a standard textbox WORKS. But I can't force them to paste there. So I am trying to catch the paste event in the Text Area and then throw the text over to the textbox. Unfortunately, I stopped short at the pasting part. I can't paste the text via JS into the simple textbox.

So my question is: how do you paste a text, how do you invoke it via JS? There are some solutions which only work in IE, that's not good, of course ::- ).

• javascript
• clipboard
• copy-paste

Share Improve this question Follow edited Dec 3, 2014 at 21:26 Dmitry Pashkevich 13.6k1010 gold badges5858 silver badges7575 bronze badges asked Jan 26, 2010 at 20:11 AxonnAxonn 10.3k66 gold badges3434 silver badges4444 bronze badges 2

• The regular textbox is faster because it only holds one line (duh). – Josh Stodola Commented Jan 26, 2010 at 20:23
• Duh of course. But it still pastes Excel data ok, separated by tab. – Axonn Commented Jan 26, 2010 at 21:19

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5 Answers 5

Sorted by: Reset to default 6

Simple.

var isIe = (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("msie") != -1 
            || navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("trident") != -1);

document.getElementById('textinput').addEventListener('paste', function(e) {
    var text;
    
    if (isIe) {
        text = window.clipboardData.getData('Text')   
    } else {
        text = e.clipboardData.getData('text/plain');
    }
    
    // Do whatever you want with the text
    console.log(text);
    
    //If you don't want the text pasted in the textarea
    e.preventDefault();
});

<textarea id="textinput"></textarea>

If you want, you can even get rid of the textarea and do this more directly. I wrote a technical blog post explaining how we do copying and pasting at Lucidchart (where I work).

Sorry, didn't quite catch the idea. Can't you attach to thextarea's onpaste event (at least I know IE has such event) and then simply set textarea's value to the pasted value?

    pastedContent = window.clipboardData.getData("Text");
    document.getElementById("yourtextarea").value = pastedContent;

EDIT: ok, it seems like this only works in IE and newer versions of FF, but it's not a cross-browser solution.

I can't paste the text via JS into the simple textbox

When you say “simple textbox”, do you mean <input type="text">? If so, then I think setting its value attribute to the text you’ve captured from the <textarea> should work.

Enable javascript Copy to Clipboard in Firefox or Mozilla: http://www.febooti./support/website-help/website-javascript-copy-clipboard.html

Try CodeMirror as alternate solution. Doesn't check it with copy&paste with huge/excel amount of data but maybe this help...