Copying text to the clipboard shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't require dozens of steps to configure or hundreds of KBs to load. But most of all, it shouldn't depend on Flash or any bloated framework.

That's why clipboard.js exists.

You can get it on npm.

Or if you're not into package management, just download a ZIP file.

First, include the script located on the dist folder or load it from a third-party CDN provider.

Now, you need to instantiate it by passing a DOM selector, HTML element, or list of HTML elements.

Internally, we need to fetch all elements that matches with your selector and attach event listeners for each one. But guess what? If you have hundreds of matches, this operation can consume a lot of memory.

For this reason we use event delegation which replaces multiple event listeners with just a single listener. After all, #perfmatters.

We're living a _declarative renaissance_, that's why we decided to take advantage of HTML5 data attributes for better usability.

A pretty common use case is to copy content from another element. You can do that by adding a data-clipboard-target attribute in your trigger element.

The value you include on this attribute needs to match another's element selector.

Additionally, you can define a data-clipboard-action attribute to specify if you want to either copy or cut content.

If you omit this attribute, copy will be used by default.