Ubuntu – How to edit the source of HTML in the clipboard

clipboarddesktop-environments

If I cut some HTML from a Pidgin instant messenger window, I can easily paste it verbatim into a new HTML email in Thunderbird. All formatting (fonts, colors, etc) are preserved, so it appears that my Ubuntu 13.10 desktop clipboard must have the HTML source somewhere.

But I'd like to tweak the HTML source.

How can I actually get at the HTML source when it is in the clipboard? I'd like to just throw it into a text file, work on the markup in Vim or whatever, then use this HTML source in a webpage or feed it to Thunderbird's "Insert → HTML".

Hmm, maybe something like PasteImg (mentioned in Getting a graphic on the clipboard to the disk?), but using request_rich_text() instead of request_image()? I wouldn't mind using a small Python script the rare times I want to get HTML source from the clipboard.

What's in the clipboard may actually be "rich text".

The Python script from this answer outputs

Current clipboard offers formats: ('TIMESTAMP', 'TARGETS', 'MULTIPLE',
'SAVE_TARGETS', 'COMPOUND_TEXT', 'STRING', 'TEXT', 'UTF8_STRING', 'text/html',
'text/plain')

Turns out my Pidgin logs are in HTML, so that's one way to get at this HTML source, bypassing the clipboard entirely. I'm still interested in the answer to the original question (how to retrieve HTML from the clipboard).

Best Answer

Found it! Here's how to get at the HTML source when there's some on your clipboard:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import gtk
print (gtk.Clipboard().wait_for_contents('text/html')).data

This helped.

This didn't work for me. My callback was never entered.

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