HDROP Data Format

Advanced > Understanding Clipboard Formats > HDROP Data Format

This is a list of files, copied from Windows Explorer.  It can be used to copy and paste files in Explorer. However, keep in mind that it is only a LIST of the files - not the file contents themselves. So if you copy, then delete the files, you can't paste them - you'll get an error from Explorer.  So, beware.

The format is useful to ClipMate however, as inside the data is a readable list of the files that were copied. ClipMate "cracks" the data open, extracts the list of files, and makes up a TEXT representation of the list. So you can easily get a listing of files, by copying into ClipMate.  In other words, when you copy the files, ClipMate derives a TEXT representation from the HDROP.  To have ClipMate automatically make this conversion, enable it in the Editing Rules page of the User Preferences dialog box.