Copying from clipboard using tkinter without displaying window

Running Python 3.4 on Windows 7. I need to copy what's stored in the clipboard to a variable in my python program. I've seen on Stack Overflow that that can be done either with `pywin32` or `tkinter`. Since `tkinter` is part of the python standard library, I decided that that was the better of the two since the user won't have to install an external module. Here's the code for getting the clipboard data in `tkinter`: ``` import tkinter number = tkinter.Tk().clipboard_get() ``` This works fine except a blank `tkinter` window pops up every time this executes. Why is this happening? Normally `tkinter` doesn't display anything until `tk().mainloop()` is run. Is there any way to avoid this window popping up? If not, I guess I'll just use `pywin32`.