What the tool does
Clipboard Inspector is a free, browser-based utility that reveals every MIME type and raw value stored on your system clipboard the moment you paste or drop something on the page. It was designed for web developers who need to understand exactly what their paste and drop event handlers receive — and for curious technical users who want to see what actually lives on their clipboard at any given moment.
Why we built it
Clipboard handling in the browser is deceptively complex. A single copy operation from Google Docs can produce text/plain, text/html, and several custom application/* MIME types at once. A screenshot pasted from your OS shows up as image/png with a file handle attached. An Excel cell range arrives as a tiny HTML table, a tab-delimited text block, and sometimes a proprietary binary format. Without a way to visualise the full payload, developers often guess at what the clipboard contains, hard-code assumptions that break under unusual inputs, and ship features that feel broken to users who copy from anything other than the app they tested against.
Every developer we've talked to has hit this wall. They open the browser's DevTools, paste into a quick test page, log event.clipboardData.types to the console, and manually iterate through each type to read the data. That works but it's slow and it doesn't show images, files, or binary formats nicely. We wanted a tool that shows the whole picture in one view, on one page, with no setup.
Design principles
- Zero friction. No login, no install, no setup. Open the page, press Ctrl+V, see everything.
- Privacy first. Clipboard data never leaves your device. Everything runs in client-side JavaScript. The Network tab in DevTools is the only proof you need.
- Honest display. We show the raw values and MIME types exactly as the browser reports them — no reformatting, no hiding data, no pretty-printing that might obscure a bug.
- Works offline. Clipboard Inspector is a Progressive Web App. Install it once and it will launch instantly with no network dependency.
- Every paste, not just the last one. A local history panel keeps past inspections so you can compare them side by side.
Who should use it
The tool is built for developers working on rich-text editors, file-upload flows, drag-and-drop integrations, paste-to-import features, screenshot handlers, and anything else that touches clipboard data. It's also useful for QA engineers reproducing paste-related bugs, support teams trying to understand what a user pasted before an app crashed, and security-conscious users who want to double-check what remained on their clipboard after a sensitive copy operation — and then wipe it.
How it works (technically)
Clipboard Inspector listens for the browser's native paste event on the document body. When a paste fires, the handler iterates over every entry in event.clipboardData.items, reading string items through getAsString and files through getAsFile. Each entry is then rendered as a card showing its MIME type, a decoded preview, and an action button that copies the raw value back to your clipboard. For drag-and-drop, an identical pipeline reads the dataTransfer object from the drop event. The modern navigator.clipboard.read() API is wired to a button for cases where an event-based handler isn't convenient.
Technology
The site is built with Nuxt 3 and Vue 3 Composition API. It prerenders to static HTML at build time and is deployed as a single static bundle. There is no server component — the only requests you'll see after the page loads are analytics and advertising scripts, both gated behind the consent banner and Google Consent Mode v2. Clipboard content itself is never transmitted: every paste is processed in the page and stored, if at all, in your own browser's localStorage.
Roadmap
We want to make Clipboard Inspector the fastest way to understand paste behaviour anywhere on the web. Planned improvements include deeper inspection of rich-text HTML (detecting styles that break rich-text editors), automatic diffing between two clipboard snapshots, richer binary viewers (hex + decoded structure) for common image and document formats, and exportable reports for bug tickets. If there's a feature you need, tell us via the Contact page.
Who builds it
Clipboard Inspector is built and maintained by Emre Polat, an independent web developer. The tool started as a scratch page for debugging a rich-text editor that mangled everything pasted out of Microsoft Word, and grew into the site you are reading now. Every article on the blog and every guide in the guides section is written by hand from that same working experience — no syndicated content, no generated filler — and each claim is verified against the live inspector in Chrome, Firefox and Safari before it is published.
Corrections are welcome. If something on this site is wrong or out of date, write in and it will be fixed and the article's update date changed to reflect it.
Contact and feedback
Bug reports, feature requests, and developer feedback all reach a human. Please write to contact@clipboardinspector.com or use the Contact page — every message is read, and most get a reply within three business days.