The cut event of the Clipboard API 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.

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 canceling the default action using event.preventDefault().

Note though that canceling 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.

This event bubbles up the DOM tree, eventually to Document and Window, is cancelable and is composed.

Syntax

Use the event name in addEventListener():

addEventListener("cut", (event) => { })

Alternatively, assign to the event handler property of the interface:

oncut = (event) => { }

Event type

A ClipboardEvent. Inherits from Event.

Examples

Live example

HTML

<div class="source" contenteditable="true">Cut text from this box.</div>
<div class="target" contenteditable="true">And paste it into this one.</div>

div.source,
div.target {
  border: 1px solid gray;
  margin: 0.5rem;
  padding: 0.5rem;
  height: 1rem;
  background-color: #e9eef1;
}

JavaScript

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

See also

• copy event
• paste event