getting HTML source or rich text from the X clipboard

Question

How can rich text or HTML source code be obtained from the X clipboard? For example, if you copy some text from a web browser and paste it into kompozer, it pastes as HTML, with links etc. preserved. However, xclip -o for the same selection just outputs plain text. I'd like to pull the HTML out and into a text editor.

Answer 1

With some help from the answer to the stackoverflow.com fork of this question, I built a ghetto command-line client to pull this info.

Usage

clipcli [-h] [-f FILE] [-d] [-l] [TARGET]

positional arguments:
  TARGET                display the contents of this target

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d, --debug           enable debug tracing
  -f FILE, --file FILE  the file to which output will be directed
  -l, --list            list available targets

Example:

$ clipcli text/html
some text with <em>emphasis</em>

The way this works, even the availability of different targets, seems to depend a lot on the application which is providing the clipboard data. There's a bit more info at the stackoverflow question.

Answer 2

Does xclip -o -selection secondary or xclip -o -selection clipboard work for you?

These could be abbreviated to

xclip -o -se s 

and

xclip -o -se c