How to paste from device clipboard in Flutter.

Samuel Ezedi
2 min readJun 29, 2020

Hey flutter friends, I’d like to show you the simple act of pasting from the clipboard. Yes! Pasting. “Oh! don’t I already know that?” well, maybe you do but here’s why am I writing about this.

Reason for writing

I have built quite a few apps that enabled users the ability to tap an Iconbutton or a button and copy a text and it worked all fine until I was building a URL shortener. This time, I needed the user to tap an IconButton and paste whatever was in their clipboard, and to my greatest surprise, the plugin I was using didn’t have the ability to paste.

I did a little digging and found another plugin that would paste but it will only paste what was copied in your app which wasn’t what I wanted, remember I wanted to paste what was in the device clipboard, so if a user copied something from maybe Whatsapp, twitter, etc. if he tapped the paste icon in my app, it should paste what's in his clipboard in my app right.

So I found another package that enabled me to do just this. It allows copying and pasting. Here’s all you need to achieve this.

First visit pub.dev/packages/clipboard

Paste this in your pubspec.yaml file:

clipboard: ^0.1.2+5

then run:

flutter pub get

Now make sure to import into your dart file.

import 'package:clipboard/clipboard.dart';

Here’s a code snippet of how to Paste from Clipboard:

Here’s a code snippet of how to Copy to Clipboard:

That’s it for this article! I hope you enjoyed it, and be sure to follow me for more Flutter articles and comment for any feedback you might have about this article.

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