Element: paste event

The paste event is fired when the user has initiated a "paste" action through the browser's user interface.

If the cursor is in an editable context (for example, in a <textarea> or an element with contenteditable attribute set to true) then the default action is to insert the contents of the clipboard into the document at the cursor position.

A handler for this event can access the clipboard contents by calling getData() on the event's clipboardData property.

To override the default behavior (for example to insert some different data or a transformation of the clipboard contents) an event handler must cancel the default action using event.preventDefault(), and then insert its desired data manually.

It's possible to construct and dispatch a synthetic paste event, but this will not affect the document's contents.

Examples

Live example

HTML

<div class="source" contenteditable="true">Try copying text from this box...</div>
<div class="target" contenteditable="true">...and pasting it into this one</div>

div.source, div.target {
    border: 1px solid gray;
    margin: .5rem;
    padding: .5rem;
    height: 1rem;
    background-color: #e9eef1;
}

JS

const target = document.querySelector('div.target');

target.addEventListener('paste', (event) => {
    let paste = (event.clipboardData || window.clipboardData).getData('text');
    paste = paste.toUpperCase();

    const selection = window.getSelection();
    if (!selection.rangeCount) return false;
    selection.deleteFromDocument();
    selection.getRangeAt(0).insertNode(document.createTextNode(paste));

    event.preventDefault();
});

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Related events: cut, copy
• This event on Document targets: paste
• This event on Window targets: paste