Copying HTML using UIPasteBoard and pasting into Gmail

Question

I am trying to find a way to use UIPasteBoard to copy a HTML string into pasteboard, and be able to paste it into different mail clients on iOS.

I tried two accepted answers from StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6566850/1249958 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/21911997/1249958. Those solutions are working on default iOS mail client but they don't make any difference on Gmail.

I know that Gmail accepts HTML input from pasteboard as copying HTML from Safari and pasting that into Gmail app works as expected.

Try to inspect the pasteboard types after copying from Safari vs. when you copy from `UIWebView`. Most likely, you need to provide an RTF type for it to work. See if that helps you, and I’ll add an answer. — Léo Natan, Sep 07 '17 at 14:44

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 11 '21 at 23:27

this will put HTML and plain text on the pasteboard and can be pasted into GMail.

UIPasteboard *pasteboard = [UIPasteboard generalPasteboard];

NSString *iOSRichContentKey = @"iOS rich content paste pasteboard type";
NSData *iOSRichContent = [iOSRichContentKey dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

NSString *sampleHTML = @"This is <span style='font-weight:bold'>HTML</span>";

NSString *appleWebArchiveKey = @"Apple Web Archive pasteboard type";
NSData *sampleHTMLData = [sampleHTML dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSDictionary *dict = @{@"WebMainResource": @{@"WebResourceData": sampleHTMLData, @"WebResourceFrameName": @"", @"WebResourceMIMEType": @"text/html", @"WebResourceTextEncodingName": @"UTF-8", @"WebResourceURL": @"about:blank"}};
NSData *appleWebArchive = [NSPropertyListSerialization dataWithPropertyList:dict format:NSPropertyListBinaryFormat_v1_0 options:0 error:nil];

NSString *plainTextKey = @"public.utf8-plain-text";
NSString *plainText = @"this is plain text";

[pasteboard setItems:@[@{iOSRichContentKey : iOSRichContent, appleWebArchiveKey : appleWebArchive, plainTextKey : plainText}]];

Copying HTML using UIPasteBoard and pasting into Gmail

1 Answers1