How to save clipboard or (car kill-ring) as string

Question

OS Debian GNU/Linux 7 emacs-24.3

I want to save the content of the clipboard or the last item of the kill-ring (depending whats newer) as a string so that I can do stuff with it in a eLisp function. At the moment I use this:

  (setq zwischenablage (car kill-ring))

I have 2 problems at the moment:

1. When the text was copied in emacs and was highlighted something like "#("Wechseln" 0 8 (fontified t face font-lock-doc-face))" is saved in the string. For some reason yank-handled-properties seems not to be applied.
2. When I copy text from outside emacs like the browser or so it is not used. I have to yank it and after this my function works fine.

Does anyone know any solution for these problems?

Answer 1

According to documentation of the kill-ring variable, interact with the kill ring directly is not recommended:

Since the kill ring is supposed to interact nicely with cut-and-paste facilities offered by window systems, use of this variable should interact nicely with interprogram-cut-function and interprogram-paste-function. The functions kill-new, kill-append, and current-kill are supposed to implement this interaction; you may want to use them instead of manipulating the kill ring directly.

In this case solution is (setq zwischenablage (current-kill 0 t))

Answer 2

I'm on Windows 10, and I'm not sure if this answer applies to other OSs; but it may help. I'm currently using Emacs 27.1, and I'm working on my init.el. I had a line at the bottom of the file which was preventing the startup screen showing. I wanted a way to move the line to somewhere at the top of my configuration file.

While there are some neat functions to do this (in another Stack Exchange answer), I wanted an out of the box solution. The command Ctrl + K kills a line from the cursor and it seems to also copy the contents of that line to the clipboard.

What I ended up doing was pressing Ctrl + A, Ctrl + K. And to paste, I did Ctrl + Y.