Read from and Write to clipboards in python scripts, works on Mac at least.

clipboard.py

import subprocess

def getClipboardData():
    p = subprocess.Popen(['pbpaste'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    retcode = p.wait()
    data = p.stdout.read()
    return data

def setClipboardData(data):
    p = subprocess.Popen(['pbcopy'], stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
    p.stdin.write(data)
    p.stdin.close()
    retcode = p.wait()

A prefix like b"text" for a string or proper encoded bytes conversion is required before entering data to setClipboardData(data) as argument to avoid:

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

To transform a unicode string to a byte string in Python do this:

'foo'.encode('utf_8')
# result is bytes string
b'foo'