I'm using a hidden text area to put some text, select it and then using document.execCommand to copy it to the clipboard. This usually works but fails (returns false) when the text is large. In Chrome v55, it seems to fail around 180K characters.

Is there a limit to the amount of data that can be copied this way? Normal Ctrl+C doesn't seem subject to the same limitations.

note: someone marked this as a possible duplicate of Does document.execCommand('copy') have a size limitation?. It might be similar question, but that one was tagged as a specific framework that I don't use and also, it wasn't answered. I believe my question is more general and still relevant.

I attach the code for reference.

      function copyTextToClipboard(text) {
        var textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
        textArea.style.position = 'fixed';
        textArea.style.top = 0;
        textArea.style.left = 0;
        textArea.style.width = '2em';
        textArea.style.height = '2em';
        textArea.style.padding = 0;
        textArea.style.border = 'none';
        textArea.style.outline = 'none';
        textArea.style.boxShadow = 'none';
        textArea.style.background = 'transparent';
        textArea.value = text;
        document.body.appendChild(textArea);
        textArea.select();
        try {
          var successful = document.execCommand('copy');
          var msg = successful ? 'successful' : 'unsuccessful';
          console.log('Copying text command was ' + msg);
        } catch (err) {
          console.log('Oops, unable to copy');
        }
        document.body.removeChild(textArea);
      }

I'm using a hidden text area to put some text, select it and then using document.execCommand to copy it to the clipboard. This usually works but fails (returns false) when the text is large. In Chrome v55, it seems to fail around 180K characters.

Is there a limit to the amount of data that can be copied this way? Normal Ctrl+C doesn't seem subject to the same limitations.

note: someone marked this as a possible duplicate of Does document.execCommand('copy') have a size limitation?. It might be similar question, but that one was tagged as a specific framework that I don't use and also, it wasn't answered. I believe my question is more general and still relevant.

I attach the code for reference.

      function copyTextToClipboard(text) {
        var textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
        textArea.style.position = 'fixed';
        textArea.style.top = 0;
        textArea.style.left = 0;
        textArea.style.width = '2em';
        textArea.style.height = '2em';
        textArea.style.padding = 0;
        textArea.style.border = 'none';
        textArea.style.outline = 'none';
        textArea.style.boxShadow = 'none';
        textArea.style.background = 'transparent';
        textArea.value = text;
        document.body.appendChild(textArea);
        textArea.select();
        try {
          var successful = document.execCommand('copy');
          var msg = successful ? 'successful' : 'unsuccessful';
          console.log('Copying text command was ' + msg);
        } catch (err) {
          console.log('Oops, unable to copy');
        }
        document.body.removeChild(textArea);
      }

• javascript
• dom
• clipboard

• Possible duplicate of Does document.execCommand('copy') have a size limitation? – Tushar Vaghela Commented Jun 27, 2017 at 8:14
• 1 See edit. That question wasn't solved. – Pablo Varasa Commented Jun 30, 2017 at 1:09

2 Answers 2

The problem has more to do with the time it takes to render this long text than the execCommand('copy') call itself.

Firefox raises an quite explanatory error message :

document.execCommand(‘cut’/‘copy’) was denied because it was not called from inside a short running user-generated event handler.

Your code takes too long to generate the text, and thus the browser doesn't recognizes it as an semi-trusted event...

The solution is then to generate this text first, and only after listen to an user-gesture to call execCommand. So to make it possible, you can e.g. listen to a mousedown event to generate the text, and only in the mouseup event will you really execute the copy command.

const text = ('some text a bit repetitive ' + Date.now()).repeat(50000);

function copyTextToClipboard(text) {
  // first we create the textArea
  var textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
  textArea.style.position = 'absolute';
  textArea.style.opacity = '0';
  textArea.value = text;
  document.body.appendChild(textArea);

  var execCopy = e => {   // triggered on mouseup
    textArea.select();
    var successful = document.execCommand('copy');
    var msg = successful ? 'successful' : 'unsuccessful';
    console.log('Copying text command was ' + msg);
    document.body.removeChild(textArea);
  };
  // here the magic
  btn.addEventListener('mouseup', execCopy, {
    once: true 
  });
}
// triggered on mousedown
btn.onmousedown = e => copyTextToClipboard(text);

<button id="btn">copy some text in your clipboard</button>
<p>May struggle your browser a little bit, it's quite a long text... Please be patient</p>

I faced similar issue and came up with the workaround described here: How to copy extra large values to clipboard?

Idea is to check the size of the content to be copied to the clipboard and in case of size more than 150k symbols create a text file and throw it to a user.

After 5 years of usage I heard no complaints from end-users.