ansaurus

Question

VB/VBA: Fetch HTML string from clipboard (copied via web browser)

Answer 1

A:

VB6 has the Clipboard object that allows you to get the clipboard data in different formats. VBA doesn't have this object. But there are windows API calls you can use. You can see a sample implementation for VBA here.

Will Rickards 2009-03-12 18:33:55

Answer 2

+2 A:

This time I've read the question properly and realised coonj wants to get the HTML from the clipboard including tags.

I believe this is reasonably difficult. You need to read the clipboard using Windows API calls. And then, parse the resulting CF_HTML string which has some wacky headers added on top of the HTML.

Microsoft Knowledge Base article with Windows API code to read the CF_HTML from the clipboard (function GetHTMLClipboard).

You will then probably want to ignore the wacky headers. Microsoft documents the format here. An example CF_HTML fragment is shown below. You could probably come up with some guesswork method of skipping the first few lines.

Version:0.9 
StartHTML:71 
EndHTML:170 
StartFragment:140 
EndFragment:160 
StartSelection:140 
EndSelection:160 
<!DOCTYPE> 
<HTML> 
<HEAD> 
<TITLE>The HTML Clipboard</TITLE> 
<BASE HREF="http://sample/specs"&gt;  
</HEAD> 
<BODY> 
<!--StartFragment -->     <P>The Fragment</P> 
<!--EndFragment --> 
</BODY> 
</HTML>

It might also be worth thinking whether there's any other way of solving your problem. E,g, Will the browser always be Internet Explorer? Can you get what you need by walking the HTML tree using the COM object model?

EDIT: coonj has tried this now and says "the GetHTMLClipboard function seems to work with both Firefox and IE, and it doesn't look like it is throwing those headers in there"

MarkJ 2009-03-12 22:41:12

+1 for MarkJ's closing comment that finding another way might be the best thing to do.I have attempted this in the past and gave up after trying many increasing bizarre solutions. As the structure of my HTML was known and simple, in the end I just parsed the raw text and replaced the missing tags.

Lunatik 2009-03-13 09:21:05

Perfect, thanks MarkJ. The GetHTMLClipboard function seems to work with both Firefox and IE, and it doesn't look like it is throwing those headers in there.

jcoon 2009-03-13 14:46:38

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

VB/VBA: Fetch HTML string from clipboard (copied via web browser)

related questions