paste_anything

The copy-paste brain of paste_anything_editor, for teams that already have their own editor.

It reads the clipboard on the web and turns whatever is there (Word, Excel, Google Docs, web pages, Markdown, LaTeX or an image) into clean HTML that any editor can insert.

Pure Dart, web only. No Flutter or editor dependency: only web, html and markdown.

Install

dart pub add paste_anything

Paste into your editor

Implement PaeTarget on your editor and let PaePaster decide what to insert:

import 'package:paste_anything/paste_anything.dart';

class MyEditorTarget implements PaeTarget {
  @override
  void insertHtml(String html) => myEditor.insertHtml(html);

  @override
  void insertText(String text) => myEditor.insertText(text);

  @override
  Future<void> insertImage(PaeImage image) async =>
      myEditor.insertImage(await upload(image.bytes, image.mimeType));
}

// On Ctrl/Cmd+V or your paste button:
await const PaePaster(allowImages: true).pasteInto(MyEditorTarget());

PaePaster picks, in order:

1. An image, when that's all the clipboard holds (only if allowImages).
2. Rich HTML from Word, Excel, Google Docs or web pages, cleaned up.
3. Text that is HTML source, LaTeX ($x^2$, \(..\), $$..$$) or Markdown, converted to HTML.
4. Plain text.

Prefer to handle the result yourself? Use resolve:

final content = const PaePaster().resolve(await PaeClipboard.read());
switch (content) {
  case PaeHtmlContent(:final html): ...
  case PaeTextContent(:final text): ...
  case PaeImageContent(:final image): ...
  case PaeEmptyContent(): ...
}

Copy with formatting

await PaeClipboard.writeHtml(html, plainText: PaeHtml.toPlainText(html));

Building blocks

• PaeClipboard: read() (HTML, text and image in one call), readText(), writeHtml(), writeText(), waitForFocus().
• PaeHtml: normalize() cleans any HTML, plus fromMarkdown(), fromPlainText(), toPlainText() and detection helpers.
• PaeMath: finds formulas from KaTeX, MathJax, MathML and $..$ text. They're stored as <span class="math-tex" data-latex="...">, which KaTeX and MathJax can render. Also copyFormula() and readFormula().

Good to know

• The first read shows the browser's clipboard permission prompt. read() waits for the page to regain focus and then retries.
• normalize() removes scripts, embeds, event handlers and javascript: links. Still sanitize HTML on your server before showing it to other users.
• Word's local file:/// images can't be read by a browser and are dropped.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.