How to copy text from Safari

By Parham Doustdar, 3 August, 2016

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi,

It sometimes happens that I'd like to copy something from a webpage into another window. How can I do this reliably?

Thanks.

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Comments

By mehgcap on Thursday, August 25, 2016 - 09:19

Just as in most other apps, you can use the shift key with the arrow keys and other modifiers to select. For instance, shift-down selects by line, shift-option-right selects by words, and so on. This is new as of OS X 10.11, I believe, so I'm assuming you have that. You could also move to the paragraph you want, then hit vo-shift-c to copy the whole thing to the clipboard at once.

By Parham Doustdar on Thursday, August 25, 2016 - 09:19

This is new as of OS X 10.11, I believe

That was great, thanks. I didn't know about this because it wasn't mentioned in the new features in OS X 10.11. Is this officially a feature? If so, where can I find new features like this? This is a great productivity booster for me.

By Pa. Joe on Thursday, August 25, 2016 - 09:19

what has helped me a lot is keyboard commands for pages. many of the commands work with pretty much any text I have encountered. You can do a search. They are easy to find online.

By Jake on Thursday, August 25, 2016 - 09:19

In reply to by mehgcap

Shift-arrows has worked as of 10.8 though it wasn't as reliable then. Before that there was another way, and still is, to select text using VO+return.

By Sounds2Good on Sunday, September 25, 2016 - 09:19

In reply to by Jake

Unfortunately I have found it difficult to select blocks of text with VO-Return in Safari. Do I need to interact with text first? I've also tried this and still no joy most of the time. I'd love to hear from folks who can get VO-Return to select text blocks in Safari reliably.

Thanks.

By Ramy on Monday, September 25, 2023 - 09:19

Hello all:
do not know why, but shift arrows is not working with all sites, is it some kind of protection or what?
Thanks in advance

By Brian on Monday, September 25, 2023 - 09:19

Some websites are scripted and/or coded to not allow things like copy/pasting text, right clicking on images, etc, etc. The ability to do this has been around for ages, and there is not really anything you can do about it, short of OCR'ing it.

By Ramy on Monday, September 25, 2023 - 09:19

very strange, but wish we have a solution for this