How to Prevent IE and Opera from copying pseudo-elements to clipboard?

Question

Playing around with shjs in order to display line numbers, line breaks and spaces, i came across this: Using Pseudo-Elements for the ›hidden‹ characters it behaves just as expected (in Firefox): no line numbers, spaces or line endings get copied to clipboard.

As IE8 displays everything well, I was surprised it behaves different with copy+paste.

Copy+pasting a line from FF looks like so (which is fine):

config = ({

While the same, copied from IE8 reads:

14·config· =· ({¶

The same with Opera, btw.

Does anyone know which behaviour is the correct one, and if there is a way to teach the browser the desired behaviour?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Opera and IE are correct: There is no rule which forbids copying generated content. Mozilla’s behavior is btw one of the many reasons why you can’t use the <q> element …

Unfortunately, you can’t bring all browsers in line. Generated content is not part of the DOM and therefor not accessible per Javascript.