Clear the system clipboard using the GTK lib, in C

Question

I'm calling the following function to try to clear the system clipboard:

GtkClipboard *clipboard;

clipboard = gtk_clipboard_get(GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD);
gtk_clipboard_clear(clipboard);

however it's not cleaning anything. I've searched the Gnome and GTK+ documentations and countless sample code snippets and I've no idea how to do this.

so my question, how do you clear the system (linux, gnome) clipboard by code? Thanks!

Answer 1

I believe you need to actually set it with a zero-length text to clear it completely, I'm unsure myself why this is necessary but this code seems to work :

clipboard = gtk_clipboard_get(GDK_SELECTION_PRIMARY);                                                            
gtk_clipboard_clear(clipboard);                                                                                  
gtk_clipboard_set_text(clipboard, "", 0);                                                                        

clipboard = gtk_clipboard_get(GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD);                                                          
gtk_clipboard_clear(clipboard);                                                                                
gtk_clipboard_set_text(clipboard, "", 0);

Note that when GTK+ is running under X11, there are actually two 'clipboards', the GTK (GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD) one and the X11 one (GDK_SELECTION_PRIMARY). Under Windows, operations on GDK_SELECTION_PRIMARY I think do nothing.