clipboard-text-parser

A lightweight, zero-dependency TypeScript library for parsing, cleaning, and extracting metadata from raw clipboard payloads.

🚀 See this library in action! Try Textunnel - Cross-Device Clipboard Sync.

Features

• URL & Email Extraction: Automatically detect and extract arrays of URLs and emails from copied text.
• HTML Stripping: Fast, RegEx/DOM-based utility to strip formatting from text/html clipboard payloads (a very common developer pain point).
• Code Snippet Detection: Uses heuristics to detect if the clipboard data is likely a programming language snippet.
• Type Detection: Identifies if the payload is purely a single URL, email, code snippet, or general text.

Installation

npm install clipboard-text-parser

Quick Start

import { parseClipboardText, stripHtmlFromClipboard } from 'clipboard-text-parser';

// 1. Parsing raw text
const rawText = "Check out my new repo at https://github.com and email me at [email protected]";
const result = parseClipboardText(rawText);

console.log(result.urls);   // ['https://github.com']
console.log(result.emails); // ['[email protected]']


// 2. Stripping HTML from rich-text clipboard
const richText = "<p>Hello <b>World</b>!</p><br/>Textunnel is great.";
const cleanText = stripHtmlFromClipboard(richText);
// Output: "Hello World!\nTextunnel is great."

Why we built this

Handling raw clipboard data from navigator.clipboard.readText() or onPaste events is notoriously messy. We built this package to power the real-time parsing engine behind Textunnel - P2P File Sharing. It provides reliable, cross-device parsing logic directly in the browser to ensure that complex clipboard data (like rich HTML or mixed code snippets) is accurately processed before peer-to-peer transmission.

API Reference

parseClipboardText(text: string): ClipboardParsedResult

Returns { raw, urls, emails, isCodeSnippet }

stripHtmlFromClipboard(html: string): string

Returns clean, unformatted plain text while preserving paragraph breaks.

detectClipboardType(data: string): 'empty' | 'url' | 'email' | 'code' | 'text'

Returns the dominant type of the clipboard string.

Built with ❤️ by the team at Textunnel - Secure Paste Sharing.