from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you view copied browser content?

by ademup on 11/19/21, 10:20 PM with 2 comments

I learned today that when you Copy All inside of a browser and then Paste into your text editor: It DOES NOT SHOW you the full contents of what is saved. I see stripped content. This greatly concerns me because I thought I could copy into a text editor, review for malicious javascript and various html etc, and if all clear, then paste the same contents into eg: another page (maybe the contents of a new comment box, or run a script on my server, etc). But all of the tags etc disappear when pasting into my text editor, leaving me with a completely false sense of security.

So I ask you, oh wise ones: How do YOU verify the contents of copied HTML from a browser?

How to reproduce my problem: 1) ctrl+a and ctrl+c this web site 2) open gedit, notepad, or create a new file in PHPStorm or even dev console 3) ctrl+v : you see plain text 4) go to summernote.org and ctrl+v into the big test box (even try this in a different browser!) 5) you see html the result of html,css, etc

  • by ademup on 11/19/21, 10:32 PM

    To clarify: I'm in Ubuntu and the problem seems to be more strongly pronounced when copying from Chrome. eg: There's a website that uses Modals to display profiles. When pasting from that profile copied from Chrome, summernote will display a modal that covers the whole screen. But when pasting the profile copied from within Firefox, the contents of the summernote box stay contained.

  • by ademup on 11/19/21, 10:33 PM

    I observe the same behavior in react-simple-wysiwyg. It is possible to paste html content that "escapes" the editor. Meanwhile, there appears to be NO WAY to view the content in a text editor or even code editor like PHPstorm.