Copy highlighted code to the clipboard

Written byPhuoc Nguyen

Category

Level 3 — Advanced

Created

19 Apr, 2020

Allowing users to copy sample code is a common thing in the web development nowadays. To demonstrate the implementation, we create two elements:

<pre id="sampleCode"><code>...</code></pre>
<button id="copyButton">Copy</button>

The `sampleCode` element contains the sample code which is already highlighted.

Copying the sample code to the clipboard could consist of three steps:

Select the text content of the code element
Copy it to the clipboard using the `document.execCommand('copy')` function
Last but not least, both the steps above have an effect on the text selection.

So we have to backup the current selected text before copying, and restore it at the end.

You can see the code in the demo below. Enjoy!

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Phước Nguyễn

Copy highlighted code to the clipboard

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