clipboard(n) Tk Built-In Commands clipboard(n)_________________________________________________________________NAMEclipboard - Manipulate Tk clipboardSYNOPSISclipboard option ?arg arg ...?
_________________________________________________________________DESCRIPTION
This command provides a Tcl interface to the Tk clipboard,
which stores data for later retrieval using the selection
mechanism. In order to copy data into the clipboard,
clipboard clear must be called, followed by a sequence of
one or more calls to clipboard append. To ensure that the
clipboard is updated atomically, all appends should be
completed before returning to the event loop.
The first argument to clipboard determines the format of
the rest of the arguments and the behavior of the command.
The following forms are currently supported:
clipboard clear ?-displayof window?
Claims ownership of the clipboard on window's dis-
play and removes any previous contents. Window
defaults to ``.''. Returns an empty string.
clipboard append ?-displayof window? ?-format format?
?-type type? ?--? data
Appends data to the clipboard on window's display
in the form given by type with the representation
given by format and claims ownership of the clip-
board on window's display.
Type specifies the form in which the selection is
to be returned (the desired ``target'' for conver-
sion, in ICCCM terminology), and should be an atom
name such as STRING or FILE_NAME; see the Inter-
Client Communication Conventions Manual for com-
plete details. Type defaults to STRING.
The format argument specifies the representation
that should be used to transmit the selection to
the requester (the second column of Table 2 of the
ICCCM), and defaults to STRING. If format is
STRING, the selection is transmitted as 8-bit ASCII
characters. If format is ATOM, then the data is
divided into fields separated by white space; each
field is converted to its atom value, and the
32-bit atom value is transmitted instead of the
atom name. For any other format, data is divided
into fields separated by white space and each field
Tk 4.0 1
clipboard(n) Tk Built-In Commands clipboard(n)
is converted to a 32-bit integer; an array of inte-
gers is transmitted to the selection requester.
Note that strings passed to clipboard append are
concatenated before conversion, so the caller must
take care to ensure appropriate spacing across
string boundaries. All items appended to the clip-
board with the same type must have the same format.
The format argument is needed only for compatibil-
ity with clipboard requesters that don't use Tk.
If the Tk toolkit is being used to retrieve the
CLIPBOARD selection then the value is converted
back to a string at the requesting end, so format
is irrelevant.
A -- argument may be specified to mark the end of
options: the next argument will always be used as
data. This feature may be convenient if, for exam-
ple, data starts with a -.
KEYWORDS
clear, format, clipboard, append, selection, type
Tk 4.0 2