Element: cut event

The cut event is fired when the user has initiated a "cut" action through the browser's user interface.

If the user attempts a cut action on uneditable content, the cut event still fires but the event object contains no data.

Bubbles Yes
Cancelable Yes
Interface ClipboardEvent
Event handler property oncut

The event's default action is to copy the current selection (if any) to the system clipboard and remove it from the document.

A handler for this event can modify the clipboard contents by calling setData(format, data) on the event's ClipboardEvent.clipboardData property, and cancelling the default action using event.preventDefault().

Note though that cancelling the default action will also prevent the document from being updated. So an event handler which wants to emulate the default action for "cut" while modifying the clipboard must also manually remove the selection from the document.

The handler cannot read the clipboard data.

It's possible to construct and dispatch a synthetic cut event, but this will not affect the system clipboard or the document's contents.

Examples

Live example

HTML

<div class="source" contenteditable="true">Try cutting text from this box...</div>
<div class="target" contenteditable="true">...and pasting it into this one</div>

JS

const source = document.querySelector('div.source');

source.addEventListener('cut', (event) => {
    const selection = document.getSelection();
    event.clipboardData.setData('text/plain', selection.toString().toUpperCase());
    selection.deleteFromDocument();
    event.preventDefault();
});

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
cut_event
1
≤18
Yes
Yes
15
3
1
18
Yes
14
3
1.0

See also

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/cut_event