How to set HTML to clipboard in C#?

.net, c#, clipboard, html

Solution

When setting HTML text, you need to provide a header with additional information to what fragment of the html you actually want to paste while being able to provide additional styling around it:

Version:0.9
StartHTML:000125
EndHTML:000260
StartFragment:000209
EndFragment:000222
<HTML>
<head>
<title>HTML clipboard</title>
</head>
<body>
<!–StartFragment–><b>Hello!</b><!–EndFragment–>
</body>
</html>

With the header (and correct indexes), calling `Clipboard.SetText` with `TextDataFormat.Html` will do the trick.

To handle HTML and plain text pastes, you can’t use the `Clipboard.SetText` method, as it clears the clipboard each time it’s called; you need to create a `DataObject` instance, call its `SetData` method once with HTML and once with plain text, and then set the object to clipboard using `Clipboard.SetDataObject`.

Update

See "Setting HTML/Text to Clipboard revisited" for more details and ClipboardHelper implementation.

Problem

I want to put rich text in HTML on the clipboard so when the users paste to Word, it will include the source HTML formatting. Using the `Clipboard.SetText` method doesn't work. Also, I would like that if users paste into a rich editor like Word it will paste formatted text, and if they paste into a plain editor like Notepad it will paste plain text.

Original source