Save bitmap to clipboard

[techtonik]

It would be nice if there was API that can save captured bitmaps to clipboard. Something that accepts PyCBitmap object from pywin32:

SetClipboardData(CF_BITMAP, dataBitMap)

[asweigart]

Good idea. I'd like to keep Pyperclip platform-independent. But if it's not that difficult to implement this on Windows, then having this be a Windows-only feature for now would be good.

[mhils]

Implementing this is quite easy - one just needs to expose a format parameter which defaults to CF_UNICODETEXT and then replace the two occurences of CF_UNICODETEXT with that.
The harder problem is that different function signatures per OS are really ugly. One could add the format parameter to every clipboard and raise RuntimeErrors if the clipboard is text only add a dedicated copy_bitmap method. The latter is difficult again because there isn't really a finite list of clipboard data types (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms649013(v=vs.85).aspx)

[techtonik]

Well, ability of clipboard formats is not a problem - as long as there is room for extension people will add what they need when they need it. The current problem is to understand where to add this and how to debug possible "unable to convert format XXX to YYY" errors. At least information about XXX and YYY should be easily accessible.

My fullstop is that I don't know how to convert PyCBitmap wrapper from pywin32 back into the system level object to call SetClipboardData WinAPI through ctypes. I also know that need to be careful about memory and check that it is not freed all of a sudden.

[mhils]

The current implementation of copy should handle memory allocation just fine for all cases. If you look at the way it works, there's no actual conversion (just copying which would need to be fixed to work with non-unicode lengths, probably by just converting unicode to bytes in the Python level).

[jaraco]

See the jaraco.clipboard for an implementation that handles clipboard images on Windows.

[compute-e]

This would be a useful feature - allowing code to copy/get an image in the clipboard with Python on different operating systems, using this simple cross-platform clipboard module.
The jaraco.clipboard module described above (based on pyperclip and xerox) appears to do the job but only supports other formats on MacOS (HTML) and Windows (HTML and images).
So image data use is still Windows-only.

[stuaxo]

Under Linux would format end up being a mimetype ?

See -
https://askubuntu.com/questions/759651/how-to-copy-an-image-to-the-clipboard-from-a-file-using-command-line

[Erriez]

I could not find a Python library to load/save clipboard to/from a file. Also this library cannot handle clipboard images, so I created win32clipboard_example.py for Windows only. It can copy screenshots or images to/from MSPaint and probably more applications.