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Lizely

Clipboard Viewer

Inspect clipboard text locally, reveal invisible whitespace, and measure characters, code points, UTF-8 bytes, lines, words, and JSON validity.

Privacy: your files never leave your device. All processing happens locally in your browser.

How to use

  1. 1.Click Read clipboard and approve the browser prompt, or paste text directly into the editor.
  2. 2.Compare character, code-point, UTF-8 byte, line, word, whitespace, and JSON results.
  3. 3.Enable Show spaces, tabs, and line endings when hidden formatting may be the problem.
  4. 4.Clear the editor after inspection, especially when the text contains sensitive information.

About Clipboard Viewer

Clipboard problems are often invisible. A value that looks correct may contain a trailing space, a tab, mixed line endings, a hidden carriage return, or a Unicode character that occupies more than one JavaScript code unit. Clipboard Viewer gives you a controlled place to examine text before pasting it into source code, a terminal, a configuration file, a database field, or an online form. You can request text through the browser Clipboard API or paste it directly into the editor. The analysis updates immediately and reports character code units, Unicode code points, UTF-8 bytes, logical lines, word-like tokens, whitespace characters, and whether the trimmed value parses as JSON.

The distinction between these counts is useful in real debugging. JavaScript string length counts UTF-16 code units, so some emoji and supplementary Unicode characters count as two. The code-point count treats each Unicode code point as one item. UTF-8 byte length shows how much space the text needs when encoded for many files, APIs, and network protocols. These values can differ without any corruption. Line counting recognizes LF, CRLF, and standalone CR separators as line endings. Word counting uses Unicode letters and numbers with common internal apostrophes, underscores, and hyphens, so it is a practical inspection aid rather than a linguistic authority.

Enable the invisible-character view to make spaces, tabs, carriage returns, and line feeds explicit. Spaces appear as centered dots, tabs as arrows, and line endings as visible symbols while the underlying editor value remains unchanged. This is especially helpful when comparing copied shell commands, YAML indentation, CSV rows, environment variables, or text moved between Windows, macOS, and Linux. The JSON indicator performs a strict JSON.parse check on trimmed text. It does not repair JSON, run code, follow links, or interpret pasted HTML. A valid result means only that the text is syntactically valid JSON, not that its fields are safe or correct.

Direct clipboard reading is a protected browser capability. It generally requires HTTPS, a focused page, a user gesture, and browser permission. Browsers may still deny the request because of user settings, enterprise policy, embedded-page restrictions, or unsupported APIs. A denial is not treated as lost data: the tool shows a clear message and the normal Command+V or Ctrl+V route remains available. The tool reads text only; it does not attempt to expose clipboard images, rich HTML, files, or platform-specific formats. Empty or non-text clipboards can produce an empty string.

Privacy is the main design constraint. Analysis happens locally in the current tab, no clipboard text is submitted to a Lizely server, and clearing the editor removes the working value from the component state. Even so, think before granting clipboard access: a clipboard can contain passwords, tokens, personal data, or private customer information. Prefer manual paste when you want to control exactly what enters the page, and clear the result after checking sensitive content. The input budget prevents an accidental enormous paste from freezing the interface. Clipboard Viewer is an inspection tool, not a secure secret scanner, malware detector, or compliance system.

Methodology & sources

Uses browser-native TextEncoder for UTF-8 size, Array.from for Unicode code points, explicit CRLF/CR/LF splitting for lines, Unicode-aware token matching for words, JSON.parse for syntax classification, and a reversible display-only mapping for invisible characters.

Frequently asked questions

Why was clipboard access denied?
Direct reading usually requires HTTPS, a focused page, a user gesture, and browser permission. Paste into the text box manually if the browser or policy blocks access.
Why do characters and code points have different totals?
JavaScript character length counts UTF-16 code units. Some emoji and supplementary characters use two code units but represent one Unicode code point.
Is pasted clipboard text uploaded?
No. The text is analyzed in your browser and is not sent to Lizely. Clear the editor after checking anything sensitive.

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