While surfing the Web, have you ever found a handy piece of information you want to add to the presentation you’re working on but can’t right-click to copy the text because the website has disabled it? Luckily, there are a few easy workarounds that let you copy and paste from any website you want.
Good to know: need to change your default browser on Android? Here’s how to proceed.
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- 1. Disable JavaScript in Your Browser
- 2. Use Your Browser’s Reading Mode Function
- 3. Copy Content from Source Code
- 4. Select from Inspect Element
- 5. Screenshot and Convert to Text
- 6. Try a Web Tool
- 7. Go for a Browser Extension
1. Disable JavaScript in Your Browser
Many websites use JavaScript to disable right-click use on a website. By disabling JavaScript for the site, you can restore the use of right-click and copy functions.
Note: keep in mind that disabling JavaScript can also affect other website functions and can prevent some images or embeds from loading.
We will show you how to do this in Chrome, but the steps should be relatively similar to those in other browsers.
Open Chrome and click on the three-dot icon next to your profile pic in the top-right corner. Select the Settings option in the drop-down menu.
Go to Security and Privacy option in the left menu. Click on Site settings on the right.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on JavaScript.
Press on the Add button to block a website from using JavaScript.
Enter the URL of the website where you want to disable JavaScript into the pop-up window and click once again on the Add button.
Go back to the website you want to copy text from and press the refresh button. Hopefully, the copy-paste functionality will be restored.
If you see the message “For the best experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings” after disabling JavaScript, try one of the other methods detailed in the article.
Tip: make sure you know the difference between JavaScript and Java.
2. Use Your Browser’s Reading Mode Function
If you use Chrome, then a quick solution is to activate Reading Mode on the webpage that doesn’t allow copy/paste. This feature is designed to minimize distractions from images and videos on the screen and will display only text.
Open the page in question and click the three dots in the upper right. Select More tools -> Reading mode from the menu.
The text will appear right away on the right in a side window. From there you should be able to select and then copy/paste it without a problem.
If you still have issues with copying the text, right-click, and instead of selecting Copy, click Search Google…
This will open a new tab that will redirect you to Google Search. You can then copy the text from the Google Search bar.
On Firefox, you can find a similar Reading view by clicking the page-like icon located on the right in the address bar.
3. Copy Content from Source Code
If a website allows right-clicking but does not let you select text and media, this method comes in very handy.
Right-click anywhere on the website to open a drop-down list. Select View page source from that list, which opens the HTML code of the website.
Scroll down to find the text you need and copy it from here. The source code can be full of syntax that is hard to understand if you’re not a programmer. Do not get overwhelmed, as the plain text is always displayed in white or black, depending on the theme of your browser.
Even though you can copy a section of text from the page source directly, copying multiple sections or the article will take ages. To speed it up, copy the entire HTML text on the view source page.
Head over to an HTML-to-text conversion website like wordhtml.com. Paste all the copied HTML text in the HTML tab and click the Clean button to get rid of all the unnecessary code that includes JavaScript or CSS elements.
Switch to the Word editor tab to easily copy the text you want without any restrictions.
FYI: check how to Inspect Element in popular browsers on Mac.
4. Select from Inspect Element
Inspect Element is a very useful tool built into almost every web browser. It allows you to look under the hood of every website and access its source code.
Right-click anywhere on the web page to open a drop-down list and select the last option, meaning Inspect.
A sidebar will pop up on the right side of your screen, or in some cases the bottom.
Hover your mouse over the text you want to copy on the web page. Doing so will direct you toward the line of code in the Inspect Element window where you can easily copy it by double-clicking it to select it. Then right-click to Copy.
5. Screenshot and Convert to Text
If you need to copy text from a website you can also take a screenshot of the web page and convert it into text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applications.
Press the Win + Shift + S keys together and activate the snipping tool in Windows to take a screenshot of the text you want to copy. Alternatively, if you are using a Mac, press the â + Shift + 4 keys. Try to capture only the important text you want to copy and avoid snipping any unnecessary elements.
Go to ocr2edit and select the Choose File option to upload your screenshot. Once uploaded, click on the Start button to begin converting your screenshot.
When the process completes, a text file will become available for you. Click Download to save the result.
Make sure you verify if the conversion is accurate. In our testing, it worked fairly well, although part of a sentence was missing from the end result.
Alternatively, you can also use any of these ways to extract text from an image.
6. Try a Web Tool
Another solution for copy-pasting text from a website that has disabled the functionality is a web tool such as Textise.
All you need to do is add in the link to the website that’s causing you headaches and then press the Textise button.
A new page will open containing just the text. From here you can copy/paste your text easily.
This is similar to using your browser’s built-in Reader mode, but if yours doesn’t have one in your browser or the function doesn’t work for you, you can try this alternative.
7. Go for a Browser Extension
If you’ve recently stumbled upon a website that doesn’t allow you to right-click, you can install an extension in your browser to bring in that functionality. We are using the Enable Right-Click for Google Chrome extension for this example.
After adding the extension to your browser, navigate to a website that doesn’t allow you to copy-paste. Click on the extension in the browser toolbar to activate it.
You should be able to right-click on websites that didn’t allow you to copy text from them. In our testing, the extension did work with some websites. In some cases right-click functionality was restored, but the Copy option was not functional. We solved that by opting to use the Search Google for option instead.
Related: forgot a password? Here’s how to recover it using your browser.
Now that you know how to copy/paste from virtually any website, it will certainly improve your workflow. For more tips on how to be more effective, check our post on how to convert handwritten documents to text. At the same time, you might also have use for one of these online summarizer tools to shorten text.
Image credit: Freepik All screenshots by Alexandra Arici
Alexandra Arici –
Staff Writer
Alexandra is passionate about mobile tech and can be often found fiddling with a smartphone from some obscure company. She kick-started her career in tech journalism in 2013, after working a few years as a middle-school teacher. Constantly driven by curiosity, Alexandra likes to know how things work and to share that knowledge with everyone.
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