HTMLElement: paste event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2017.

The paste event fires when the user initiates a paste action through the browser's user interface.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("paste", (event) => {});

onpaste = (event) => {};

Event type

A ClipboardEvent. Inherits from Event.

Event properties

Also inherits properties from its parent Event.

ClipboardEvent.clipboardData Read only: A DataTransfer object containing the data affected by the user-initiated cut, copy, or paste operation, along with its MIME type.

Example

This example logs every copy and paste attempt to the <textarea>.

HTML

html

<h3>Play with this text area:</h3>
<textarea id="editor" rows="3">
Try copying and pasting text into this field!
</textarea>

<h3>Log:</h3>
<p id="log"></p>

JavaScript

function logCopy(event) {
  log.innerText = `Copied!\n${log.innerText}`;
}

function logPaste(event) {
  log.innerText = `Pasted!\n${log.innerText}`;
}

const editor = document.getElementById("editor");
const log = document.getElementById("log");

editor.oncopy = logCopy;
editor.onpaste = logPaste;

Result

Specifications

Specification
Clipboard API and events # clipboard-event-paste
HTML Standard # handler-onpaste

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser