Month: December 2011

Windows clipboard dumper

Kohei Yoshida7 Comments

Inspired by this bug report, I just wrote a small, quick and dirty utility to dump the current clipboard content on Windows. Windows development to me is still pretty much an uncharted territory, so even a utility as simple as this took me some time. Anyway, you can download the binary from here: clipdump.exe. Note that this is a console utility, so you need to run this from the console window.

Here is the source code.

#include <Windows.h>
 
#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
 
using namespace std;
 
size_t char_per_line = 16;
typedef vector<WORD> line_store_type;
 
void dump_line(const line_store_type& line)
{
    if (line.empty())
        return;
 
    size_t fill_size = char_per_line - line.size();
 
    line_store_type::const_iterator i = line.begin(), iend = line.end();
    for (; i != iend; ++i)
        printf("%04X ", *i);
 
    while (fill_size--)
        cout << "     ";
 
    cout << ' ';
    i = line.begin();
    for (; i != iend; ++i)
    {
        WORD c = *i;
        if (32 <= c && c <= 126)
            // ASCII printable range
            cout << static_cast<char>(c);
        else
            // non-printable range
            cout << '.';
    }
 
    cout << endl;
}
 
void dump_clip(HANDLE hdl)
{
    if (!hdl)
        return;
 
    LPTSTR buf = static_cast<LPTSTR>(GlobalLock(hdl));
    if (!buf)
        return;
 
    line_store_type line;
    line.reserve(char_per_line);
    for (size_t i = 0, n = GlobalSize(hdl); i < n; ++i)
    {
        line.push_back(buf[i]);
        if (line.size() == char_per_line)
        {
            dump_line(line);
            line.clear();
        }
    }
    dump_line(line);
 
    GlobalUnlock(hdl);
}
 
int main()
{
    if (!OpenClipboard(NULL))
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
 
    UINT fmt = 0;
    for (fmt = EnumClipboardFormats(fmt); fmt; fmt = EnumClipboardFormats(fmt))
    {
        char name[100];
        int len = GetClipboardFormatName(fmt, name, 100);
        if (!len)
            continue;
 
        cout << "---" << endl;
        cout << "format code: " << fmt << endl;
        cout << "name: " << name << endl << endl;
 
        HANDLE hdl = GetClipboardData(fmt);
        dump_clip(hdl);
    }
 
    CloseClipboard();
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

It’s nothing sophisticated, and it could probably use more polishing and perhaps some GUI (since it’s a Windows app). But for now it serves the purpose for me.

Update:
Tor has submitted his version in the comment section. Much more sophisticated than mine (and it’s C not C++).