Element: 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 of the Clipboard API 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.

This event bubbles, is cancelable and is composed.

Syntax

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

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

onpaste = (event) => {};

Event type

Examples

Live example

HTML

html
<div class="source" contenteditable="true">Copy text from this box.</div>
<div class="target" contenteditable="true">And paste it into this one.</div>

JavaScript

js
const target = document.querySelector("div.target");

target.addEventListener("paste", (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();

  let paste = (event.clipboardData || window.clipboardData).getData("text");
  paste = paste.toUpperCase();
  const selection = window.getSelection();
  if (!selection.rangeCount) return;
  selection.deleteFromDocument();
  selection.getRangeAt(0).insertNode(document.createTextNode(paste));
  selection.collapseToEnd();
});

Result

Specifications

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

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
paste event

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support

See also