Bug 186224 – Copying from inline flex behaves like block level elements.

• Component: HTML Editing
• Status: NEW

[Samuel Williams]

When copying the text from

```
<div style="display: inline-flex; white-space: pre">
  <span>This </span>
  <span>is </span>
  <span>flex </span>
</div>
```

The data that would be pasted would contain multiple lines:

```
This 
is 
flex 
```

And yet that is not similar to how it is presented in the browser:

```
This is flex
```

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/40758006>

[Samuel Williams]

I would like to add, this isn't just specific to inline-flex. It's possible that other flex box layouts do strange things when copying/pasting to plain text. Basically, copying/pasting from flex boxes generates unexpected output.

[Ryosuke Niwa]

We don't have any code to handle flex box for copy & paste so anything is possible. We probably need to do some work to support both flex box & grid layouts in our copy & paste logic somehow.

[Samuel Williams]

I did work around the issue by using an `oncopy` event handler:

https://github.com/ioquatix/jquery-syntax/blob/3cf6353facbc807c94b53cdf48c372547b7ac089/source/jquery.syntax.core.js#L45-L66

[Samuel Williams]

I am just reporting that this is still an issue. You can see a live example here:

https://www.codeotaku.com/journal/2018-06/improving-ruby-fibers/index

Try copying only the code, it will invoke the copy handler which copies it as plain text.

If you try to copy it including some of the preceding paragraph, it won't invoke the copy handler. If you paste the result into, say, TextEdit, you will get odd output.

[Ryosuke Niwa]

Yes, this is an issue. We need to handle flexbox in our copy & paste code. We don't currently have the support for it.