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Scripted Clipboard Access in Maya

I recently had a situation where we needed to access the data in the clipboard from within a Mel script; in straight mel/python there is no way to access this data (I guess because Maya is cross platform, and clipboard support is OS specific). But by using the pyWin32 extensions we can get access to the clipboard in Windows.

I’ve written two very simple mel functions that allow you to copy and paste a string to the clipboard directly.

clipboardCopy( string ) will put the string onto the clipboard.

global proc clipboardCopy( string $text )
{
	//install pyWin32Extensions, needed to access the clipboard
	pyWin32Extensions();

	python( "import win32clipboard" );

	python( "win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()\nwin32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()\nwin32clipboard.SetClipboardText('" + $text + "')\nwin32clipboard.CloseClipboard()" );
}

clipboardPaste() will return the conents of the clipboard.

global proc string clipboardPaste()
{
	//install pyWin32Extensions, needed to access the clipboard
	pyWin32Extensions();

	python( "import win32clipboard" );

	python( "win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()\nd = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData( win32clipboard.CF_TEXT )\nwin32clipboard.CloseClipboard()" );
	string $clipboardText = python( "d" );

	return $clipboardText;
}