It appears to me that some applications put extra garbage data into the clipboard. win32clipboard may have faithfully returning all of them.
I use this application to show the clipboard content: import win32clipboard, win32con def getWinClipboardText(): win32clipboard.OpenClipboard() d=win32clipboard.GetClipboardData(win32con.CF_TEXT) win32clipboard.CloseClipboard() return d print getWinClipboardText().encode('string_escape') For example, copying the Python banner from the windows console gets me this output. Notice the \x00 and garbage characters after that. ---------------------------------------------------------- Python 2.4.1 (#65, Mar 30 2005, 09:13:57) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32\r\nType "help", "copyright", "credits" or "lic ense" for more information.\x00\n ?? ---------------------------------------------------------- Some applications appear to put clean data in the clipboard always: Opera, Putty, Outlook Some applications appear to include \0 and other crap: cmd.exe, powerpoint, EmEditor.exe When I paste, it never appears to be any problem that there maybe garbage characters in the clipboard. Guess most C based program correctly null terminates the string. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list