CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#windowsspecial-charactersclipboard
Sheridan
Sheridan

Reputation: 69979

How to copy/paste special characters with Windows Clipboard and C#

I found a similar question in this post, but my problem is different, so worthy of a new post.

Basically, I have a WPF/C# application that generates a text output. The text output includes several instances of a special '℗' character. The user can click a button to be sent the information in an e-mail and this part works fine. The user can click another button in the application to copy the same text output into the clipboard and this is where I have a problem. I am using the following code to copy/paste the text.

public void SetClipboardText(string text)
{
    try { Clipboard.SetData(DataFormats.Text, text); }
    catch (COMException)
    {
        MessageBox.Show("The clipboard was inaccessible, please try again later");
    }
}

public string GetClipboardText()
{
    if (Clipboard.ContainsData("Text"))
    {
        try { return Clipboard.GetData(DataFormats.Text) as string; }
        catch (COMException)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("The clipboard was inaccessible, please try again later");
        }
    }
    return string.Empty;
}

When the copied text is pasted into any external text-editing application, the '℗' character is replaced with a '?' character. After searching the internet, I found another article relating to a similar problem regarding encoding HTML before copying to the clipboard. However, after adding the following line of code as the first line in the SetClipboardText method, the pasted '℗' character is now replaced with 'â„—' in the output.

text = Encoding.GetEncoding(0).GetString(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text));

This tells me that this is an encoding issue. So my question really is, 'which character encoding can I use to successfully copy AND paste a '℗' character?'. As you can see from all the '℗' characters in this post, it is indeed possible to copy and paste them using the clipboard... but how?

Additional information:

The '℗' character comes from the Arial font included in all Windows PCs and can also be found in the 'normal text' Font in Word. After typing (int)'℗' in the Visual Studio QuickWatch Window, I get the relating integer value of 8471 for the character.

Solution Update:

Thanks to @Ilya Ivanov, I have changed the copy/paste code to the following, which now copies and pastes special characters successfully.

public void SetClipboardText(string text)
{
    try { Clipboard.SetText(text); }
    catch (COMException)
    {
        MessageBox.Show("The clipboard was inaccessible, please try again later");
    }
}

public string GetClipboardText()
{
    if (Clipboard.ContainsText())
    {
        try { return Clipboard.GetText(); }
        catch (COMException)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("The clipboard was inaccessible, please try again later");
        }
    }
    return string.Empty;
}

Upvotes: 0

Views: 5275

Answers (1)

Ilya Ivanov
Ilya Ivanov

Reputation: 23636

Try to use Clipboard.SetText("℗", TextDataFormat.UnicodeText); instead of Clipboard.SetData. It works with special symbols like ℗

I've executed this code in LinqPad and the pasted text from clipboard into text editor - worked fine.

Upvotes: 6

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