How to copy text from a div to clipboard

The accepted answer does not work when you have multiple items to copy, and each with a separate "copy to clipboard" button. After clicking one button, the others will not work.

To make them work, I added some code to the accepted answer's function to clear text selections before doing a new one:

function CopyToClipboard(containerid) {
    if (window.getSelection) {
        if (window.getSelection().empty) { // Chrome
            window.getSelection().empty();
        } else if (window.getSelection().removeAllRanges) { // Firefox
            window.getSelection().removeAllRanges();
        }
    } else if (document.selection) { // IE?
        document.selection.empty();
    }

    if (document.selection) {
        var range = document.body.createTextRange();
        range.moveToElementText(document.getElementById(containerid));
        range.select().createTextRange();
        document.execCommand("copy");
    } else if (window.getSelection) {
        var range = document.createRange();
        range.selectNode(document.getElementById(containerid));
        window.getSelection().addRange(range);
        document.execCommand("copy");
    }
}

Both examples work like a charm :)

  1. JAVASCRIPT:

    function CopyToClipboard(containerid) {
      if (document.selection) {
        var range = document.body.createTextRange();
        range.moveToElementText(document.getElementById(containerid));
        range.select().createTextRange();
        document.execCommand("copy");
      } else if (window.getSelection) {
        var range = document.createRange();
        range.selectNode(document.getElementById(containerid));
        window.getSelection().addRange(range);
        document.execCommand("copy");
        alert("Text has been copied, now paste in the text-area")
      }
    }
    <button id="button1" onclick="CopyToClipboard('div1')">Click to copy</button>
    <br /><br />
    <div id="div1">Text To Copy </div>
    <br />
    <textarea placeholder="Press ctrl+v to Paste the copied text" rows="5" cols="20"></textarea>
  2. JQUERY (relies on Adobe Flash): https://paulund.co.uk/jquery-copy-to-clipboard


I tried the solution proposed above. But it was not cross-browser enough. I really needed ie11 to work. After trying I got to:

    <html>
        <body>
            <div id="a" onclick="copyDivToClipboard()"> Click to copy </div>
            <script>
                function copyDivToClipboard() {
                    var range = document.createRange();
                    range.selectNode(document.getElementById("a"));
                    window.getSelection().removeAllRanges(); // clear current selection
                    window.getSelection().addRange(range); // to select text
                    document.execCommand("copy");
                    window.getSelection().removeAllRanges();// to deselect
                }
            </script>
        </body>
    </html>

Tested with firefox 64, Chrome 71, Opera 57, ie11(11.472.17134.0), edge( EdgeHTML 17.17134)

Update March 27th, 2019.

For some reason document.createRange() didn't work before with ie11. But now properly returns a Range object. So is better to use that, rather than document.getSelection().getRangeAt(0).