How come sometimes when you copy and paste from the Internet, you see little yellow boxes with a

[raccoon]

scroll icon inside? What causes that?

[ManiacJoe]

1. Need more info.

Copy from what program?
Paste into what program?

[raccoon]

4. Copies from a webpage into a Word document.

Thanks to everyone for responses!

[PrestonLocke]

2. Surprised nobody has taken a bite yet

EDIT: I see ManiacJoe got a response in while I was writing this.

What program are you pasting into?

What's happening, is when you're copying from the internet, you're getting a lot more than just the visible text. You're getting all the related HTML markup.

You can see the HTML yourself by right-clicking on a webpage and selecting "View Source" or "View Page Source" or something near that. If you're using Google Chrome or Firefox you can just press Ctrl+U.

So, when you copy from a webpage, you get all that added markup. This may include or not include styling and images among other bits of code. When you paste all that data into a text editor, it doesn't always know what to do with it. Depending on the editor you're using it may try to decode some of that HTML. Even if the text editor can parse the HTML, there are still bits of code requesting data from the server where the page you copied from was hosted. Obviously this can lead to funky results since the HTML is no longer on the server.

Depending on what text editor you're using, your mileage my vary, but this is the general idea behind what you're seeing.

[ManiacJoe]

3. This would be my guess, too.

The "yellow box" icon was throwing me off.