Enumerating Windows clipboard history in PowerShell

Raymond Chen

March 3rd, 202310 4

Last time, we enumerated the contents of the Windows clipboard history from C++/WinRT and C#. Today we’ll do it from PowerShell.

Because, hey, why not.

$null = [Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer.Clipboard, Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer, ContentType=WindowsRuntime]
$op = [Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer.Clipboard]::GetHistoryItemsAsync()

$result = Await ($op) `
    ([Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer.ClipboardHistoryItemsResult])

$textops = $result.Items.Content.GetTextAsync()
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $textops.Count; $i++){ Await($textops[$i]) ([String]) }

It’s basically the same thing we’ve been doing, just written in PowerShell. Note that I’m not a PowerShell expert, so some of the things I’m doing may be suboptimal.

First, we load the Clipboard class into memory, specifying that it is a Windows Runtime class.

Next, we call Get­History­Items­Async and Await it to get the history items result.

We take the Items from the result, get their Content, and ask each Content for its text.

The text query is another asynchronous operation, so we iterate through the operations and Await each one, sending the results back into the pipeline.

I didn’t add the code to check ahead of time whether the content contained text. I just let the exception flow out of the Get­Text­Async call. Fixing this is left as an exercise.

Raymond Chen